Temporal phenotyping for transitional disease progress: An application to epilepsy and Alzheimer's disease

Complicated multifactorial diseases deteriorate from one disease to other diseases. For example, existing studies consider Alzheimer's disease (AD) a comorbidity of epilepsy, but also recognize epilepsy to occur more frequently in patients with AD than those without. It is important to understand the progress of disease that deteriorates to severe diseases. To this end, we develop a transitional phenotyping method based on both longitudinal and cross-sectional relationships between diseases and/or medications. For a cross-sectional approach, we utilized a skip-gram model to represent co-occurred disease or medication. For a longitudinal approach, we represented each patient as a transition probability between medical events and used supervised tensor factorization to decompose into groups of medical events that develop together. Then we harmonized both information to derive high-risk transitional patterns. We applied our method to disease progress from epilepsy to AD. An epilepsy-AD cohort of 600,000 patients were extracted from Cerner Health Facts data. Our experimental results suggested a causal relationship between epilepsy and later onset of AD, and also identified five epilepsy subgroups with distinct phenotypic patterns leading to AD. While such findings are preliminary, the proposed method combining representation learning with tensor factorization seems to be an effective approach for risk factor analysis.