“Not by Our Feeling, But by Other's Seeing”: Sentiment Analysis Technique in Cardiology—An Exploratory Review

Abstract

Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a novel branch of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that measures emotions or attitudes behind a written text. First applications of SA in healthcare were the detection of disease-related emotional polarities in social media. Now it is possible to extract more complex attitudes (rank attitudes from 1 to 5, assign appraisal values, apply multiple text classifiers) or feelings through NLP techniques, with clear benefits in cardiology; as emotions were proved to be veritable risk factors for the development of cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Our narrative review aimed to summarize the current directions of SA in cardiology and raise the awareness of cardiologists about the potentiality of this novel domain. This paper introduces the readers to basic concepts surrounding medical SA and the need for SA in cardiovascular healthcare. Our synthesis of the current literature proved SA's clinical potential in CVD. However, many other clinical utilities, such as the assessment of emotional consequences of illness, patient-physician relationship, physician intuitions in CVD are not yet explored. These issues constitute future research directions, along with proposing detailed regulations, popularizing health social media among elders, developing insightful definitions of emotional polarity, and investing research into the development of powerful SA algorithms.