Revealing novel, latent subsets of patients with morphoea through principal component analysis

The clinical features and patient impact of morphea, an inflammatory disorder of the skin and soft tissue, remain poorly characterized. While numerous clinical classification schemes are in use, there is little work systematically examining latent clinical and quality of life features within these clinical subtypes. In an effort to address this gap, prior work from our group revealed that the Padua Criteria performed best in grouping patients into consistent subtypes, however we did not perform in depth analysis of subsets that may exist within these subtypes.