Trend Analysis of Thyroid Cancer Research in Korea with Text Mining Techniques

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a text-centered approach to identify the research trend of thyroid cancer in Korea. We incorporate statistical analysis, text mining and machine learning techniques with our clinical insights to find connective associations between terminologies and to discover informative clusters of literatures. The incidence of thyroid cancer in Korea increased rapidly in the 2000s, which fueled the debate regarding overdiagnosis, but recently the number of patients undergoing surgery has decreased significantly due to conscious reform efforts from various circles. We analyzed the abstracts and keywords of related research papers from DBpia. It was found that most were case reports in the 1980s, and some papers in the 1990s discussed the early detection of thyroid cancer by mass screening. While many papers focused on different diagnostic techniques and the detection of small cancers in the 2000s, many emphasized more on the quality of life of patients in the 2010s. There was an apparent change in the topics of thyroid cancer research over past decades. The results of this study would serve as a reference guide for current and future research directions.