Using an optimized generative model to infer the progression of complications in type 2 diabetes patients

BACKGROUND: People live a long time in pre-diabetes/early diabetes without a formal diagnosis or management. Heterogeneity of progression coupled with deficiencies in electronic health records related to incomplete data, discrete events, and irregular event intervals make identification of pre-diabetes and critical points of diabetes progression challenging. METHODS: We utilized longitudinal electronic health records of 9298 patients with type 2 diabetes or prediabetes from 2005 to 2016 from a large regional healthcare delivery network in China. We optimized a generative Markov-Bayesian-based model to generate 5000 synthetic illness trajectories. The synthetic data were manually reviewed by endocrinologists. RESULTS: We build an optimized generative progression model for type 2 diabetes using anchor information to reduce the number of parameters learning in the third layer of the model from [Formula: see text] to [Formula: see text] , where [Formula: see text] is the number of clinical findings, [Formula: see text] is the number of complications, [Formula: see text] is the number of anchors. Based on this model, we infer the relationships between progression stages, the onset of complication categories, and the associated diagnoses during the whole progression of type 2 diabetes using electronic health records. DISCUSSION: Our findings indicate that 55.3% of single complications and 31.8% of complication patterns could be predicted early and managed appropriately to potentially delay (as it is a progressive disease) or prevented (by lifestyle modifications that keep patient from developing/triggering diabetes in the first place). CONCLUSIONS: The full type 2 diabetes patient trajectories generated by the chronic disease progression model can counter a lack of real-world evidence of desired longitudinal timeframe while facilitating population health management.