A Neural Network Approach for Understanding Patient Experiences of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD): Retrospective, Cross-sectional Study of Social Media Content.

Background: The abundance of online content contributed by patients is a rich source of insight about the lived experience of disease. Patients share disease experiences with other members of the patient and caregiver community and do so using their own lexicon of words and phrases. This lexicon and the topics that are communicated using words and phrases belonging to the lexicon help us better understand disease burden.