Abstract:
There is a growing number of websites containing patient
or consumer health information. The assumption is that patients should
be able to become knowledgeable about their health conditions and
become more involved in the management of their own health, but there
are concerns about the validity of the information to be found on the
Web. The goal of this research is to develop a system that evaluates
websites containing educational information about Inflammatory Bowel
Disease (IBD) to determine their quality and appropriateness for
consumers. A small number of websites on IBD were evaluated
manually by experts in the field. A number of different approaches
based on machine learning algorithms evaluate websites as Excellent,
Informative or Not Useful. Results of this approach are promising, but
inconclusive as the dataset of websites for training and testing was not
sufficiently large for any real conclusions to be made.
