Mining co-occurrence and sequence patterns from cancer diagnoses in New York State

The goal of this study is to discover disease co-occurrence and sequence patterns from large scale cancer diagnosis histories in New York State. In particular, we want to identify disparities among different patient groups. Our study will provide essential knowledge for clinical researchers to further investigate comorbidities and disease progression for improving the management of multiple diseases. We used inpatient discharge and outpatient visit records from the New York State Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS) from 2011-2015. We grouped each patient’s visit history to generate diagnosis sequences for seven most popular cancer types. We performed frequent disease co-occurrence mining using the Apriori algorithm, and frequent disease sequence patterns discovery using the cSPADE algorithm. Different types of cancer demonstrated distinct patterns. Disparities of both disease co-occurrence and sequence patterns were observed from patients within different age groups. There were also considerable disparities in disease co-occurrence patterns with respect to different claim types (i.e., inpatient, outpatient, emergency department and ambulatory surgery). Disparities regarding genders were mostly found where the cancer types were gender specific. Supports of most patterns were usually higher for males than for females. Compared with secondary diagnosis codes, primary diagnosis codes can convey more stable results. Two disease sequences consisting of the same diagnoses but in different orders were usually with different supports. Our results suggest that the methods adopted can generate potentially interesting and clinically meaningful disease co-occurrence and sequence patterns, and identify disparities among various patient groups. These patterns could imply comorbidities and disease progressions.