Clinical History Segment Extraction from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Assessments to Model Disease Trajectories

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a long-term illness with a wide range of symptoms and condition trajectories. To improve the understanding of these, automated analysis of large amounts of patient data holds promise. Routinely documented assessments are useful for large-scale analysis, however relevant information is mainly in free text. As a first step to extract symptom and condition trajectories, natural language processing (NLP) methods are useful to identify important textual content and relevant information. In this paper, we propose an agnostic NLP method of extracting segments of patients' clinical histories in CFS assessments. Moreover, we present initial results on the advantage of using these segments to quantify and analyse the presence of certain clinically relevant concepts.