Introduction

MedCrawler is a lightweight tool to analyze the public’s perception of medical concepts. It retrieves blog posts about certain topics and extracts medical terms from them in order to find relevant connections.

The tool contains three sub-modules for different parts of the workflow, which can be used in conjunction or alone.

The Scraper looks for blog posts according to user-specified tags. Different plugins allow to include different sources in the search.

The Indexer finds and exctracts the medically relevant words and returns them as MeSH terms.

Finally, the Grapher analyzes the occurrence of the terms in the various blog posts and presents the correlations in a network graph.

MedCrawler was developed by the Bioactivity Screening Group at the University of Helsinki (2016).