Unraveling cradle-to-grave disease trajectories from multilayer comorbidity networks

“Here, we [at the Medical University of Vienna] propose a novel approach to dynamic comorbidity networks from longitudinal population-wide healthcare data to comprehensively identify disease trajectories in an entire population. A multilayer comorbidity network is constructed where nodes correspond to diagnoses, layers to age groups, intralayer links to disease co-occurrences, and interlayer links encode the directionality of disease pairs (which diagnosis tends to occur first). We identify temporal disease trajectories as communities in this multilayer network. In some cases, these tightly connected communities share some nodes and be referred to as overlapping communities.”  MORE

Image Credit: Nature