RETRACTED: Clustering of comorbidities based on conditional probabilities of diseases in hypertensive patients

Treatment of chronic diseases, such as arterial hypertension, is always a difficult decision for cardiologist. As the majority of hypertensive patients are of older age, they also have many comorbid diseases. Optimized treatment is supposed to be targeted to the specific cluster of comorbidities. The objective of study is to find effective algorithms for clustering of comorbidities in hypertensive patients. Hierarchical structure of diseases, their types and groups was extracted from text descriptions in EHR database of Federal Almazov North-West Medical Research Centre. Three approaches were tested to find connections between comorbidities: frequency analysis, association rules mining and Bayesian networks. Robust cluster of diseases was found and contains cardiovascular, endocrinological, musculoskeletal and nervous system groups. Further research will be focused on investigating this cluster at the next level of hierarchy and incorporating time scale data of patients’ visits into analysis.