Clustering ABI Patients for a Customized Rehabilitation Process

Abstract

Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) is a medical condition resulting from injury or disease that affects the functioning of the brain. The incidence of ABI has increased in recent years, highlighting the need for a comprehensive approach to treatment and rehabilitation to improve patients’ quality of life. Developing appropriate therapies for these patients is a challenging task because of the wide diversity of effects and severity they may suffer. This problem exacerbates the complexity of designing the rehabilitation activities, which is a time-consuming and complicated task that may cause poor patient recovery, if such activities are poorly designed. In order to overcome this problem, it is common practice to create groups of patients with similar complaints and deficits and to design rehabilitation activities that may be reused internally by such groups, facilitating comparative analyses. Usually, such grouping is conducted by specialists who may neglect to detect commonalities due to the huge amount of information to be processed. In this work, a clustering of ABI patients is performed following a systematic methodology, from preprocessing the data to applying appropriate clustering algorithms, in order to guarantee an adequate clustering of ABI patients.