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Over the past few years, the number and volume of data sources in healthcare databases has grown exponentially. Analyzing these voluminous medical data is both opportunity and challenge for knowledge discovery in health informatics. In the last decade, social network analysis techniques and community detection algorithms are being used more and more in scientific fields, including healthcare and medicine. While community detection algorithms have been widely used for social network analysis, a comprehensive review of its applications for healthcare in a way to benefit both health practitioners and the health informatics community is still overwhelmingly missing. This paper contributes to fill in this gap and provide a comprehensive and up-to-date literature research. Especially, categorizations of existing community detection algorithms are presented and discussed. Moreover, most applications of social network analysis and community detection algorithms in healthcare are reviewed and categorized. Finally, publicly available healthcare datasets, key challenges, and knowledge gaps in the field are studied and reviewed.
Rostami et al. (Sun,) studied this question.