Large-Scale Analysis of the Medical Discourse on Rheumatoid Arthritis: Complementing with AI a Socio-Anthropologic Analysis

Mario Santoro () and Christine Nardini ()
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Mario Santoro: Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Via dei Taurini, 19, 00185 Roma, Italy
Christine Nardini: Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Via dei Taurini, 19, 00185 Roma, Italy

J, 2025, vol. 8, issue 4, 1-14

Abstract: The medical discourse entails the analysis of the modalities, which are far from unbiased, by which hypotheses and results are laid out in the dissemination of findings in scientific publications. This gives different emphases on the background, relevance, robustness, and assumptions that the audience takes for granted. This concept is extensively studied in socio-anthropology. However, it remains generally overlooked within the scientific community conducting the research. Yet, analyzing the discourse is crucial for several reasons: to frame policies that take into account an appropriately large screen of medical opportunities; to avoid overseeing promising but less walked paths; to grasp different types of representations of diseases, therapies, patients, and other stakeholders; to understand how these terms are conditioned by time and culture. While socio-anthropologists traditionally use manual curation methods–limited by the lengthy process–machine learning and AI may offer complementary tools to explore the vastness of an ever-growing body of medical literature. In this work, we propose a pipeline for the analysis of the medical discourse on the therapeutic approaches to rheumatoid arthritis using topic modeling and transformer -based emotion and sentiment analysis, overall offering complementary insights to previous curation.

Keywords: medical discourse; large language models; topic modeling; AI; rheumatoid arthritis; disease modifying anti-rheumatic drug; physical therapies; vagus nerve stimulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 I10 I12 I13 I14 I18 I19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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