Clustering Diagnostic Profiles of Patients

摘要

Electronic Health Records provide a wealth of information about the care of patients and can be used for checking the conformity of planned care, computing statistics of disease prevalence, or predicting diagnoses based on observed symptoms, for instance. In this paper, we explore and analyze the recorded diagnoses of patients in a hospital database in retrospect, in order to derive profiles of diagnoses in the patient database. We develop a data representation compatible with a clustering approach and present our clustering approach to perform the exploration. We use a k-means clustering model for identifying groups in our binary vector representation of diagnoses and present appropriate model selection techniques to select the number of clusters. Furthermore, we discuss possibilities for interpretation in terms of diagnosis probabilities, in the light of external variables and with the common diagnoses occurring together.