Comparison of Patient Reviews for Submental Liposuction and Kybella on the Website Realself: Is There a Superior Intervention for Submental Adiposity?
Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) have become essential in medical and surgical practices. The increased regularity of reporting has fostered a more robust discussion of clinical experiences, empowering patients to communicate their clinical experiences through various platforms, including social media and online review forums.1 An area that has recently emerged with a large need for patient-reported outcomes is submental liposuction. Currently, no validated patient-reported outcome measures exist for comparing Kybella to traditional submental liposuction. However, RealSelf is an online platform hosting numerous patient reviews of cosmetic and reconstructive plastic surgery procedures, including reviews from patients undergoing Kybella treatments. RoBERTa is a deep learning, natural language processing (NLP) model trained on 124 million posts that can be used to identify and quantify emotions and sentiments within text. The purpose of this study is to leverage NLP tools to objectively analyze patient satisfaction and emotional responses to Kybella and submental liposuction, ultimately providing insights into PROMs for these treatments.
Methods/Technique
:The authors searched the popular plastic surgery website RealSelf for patient reviews related to Kybella and submental liposuction in July 2024. Reviews that were not in English, did not directly mention the use of either intervention, included a review that specifically mentioned the provider without details of their procedure, or a review that mentioned additional interventions or procedures concurrently were excluded. Two different NLP models then analyzed the posts. The first was a binary model that characterized each post as positive or negative and rated each category from 0 to 1. The latter was an emotion-based model that scored each post from 0 to 1 about seven emotions – fear, sadness, anger, disgust, neutral, surprise, and joy. Posts were then classified by their highest-scoring emotion.
Results/Complications
:Overall, 1,338 posts met the inclusion criteria – 753 for submental liposuction and 585 for Kybella. Of the posts for submental liposuction, 83.4% were categorized as ‘positive,’ compared to only 55.2% of the Kybella posts (p < 0.00001). Furthermore, the average submental liposuction review had an average ‘positive’ score of 0.73, whereas the Kybella mean positive score was 0.41 (p < 0.0001). In the emotional sentiment analysis, reviews for submental liposuction were mainly categorized as depicting ‘joy’ (386 reviews, 51.3%), ‘fear’ (65 reviews, 8.6%), and ‘surprise’ (55 reviews, 7.3%). Kybella’s reviews were said to most commonly display the emotions of ‘joy’ (133 reviews, 22.7%), ‘sadness’ (105 reviews, 17.9%), and ‘fear’ (70 reviews, 12%).
Conclusion
:NLP was utilized to produce a structured sentiment analysis of PROMs from unstructured text reviews on the social media website RealSelf. Traditional submental liposuction appears to be significantly superior regarding patient satisfaction to Kybella for addressing submental adiposity.