Abstract
Chronic gastrointestinal (GI) conditions, such as inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), offer a promising opportunity to create classification systems that can enhance the accuracy of predicting the most effective therapies and prognosis for each patient. Here, we present a novel methodology to explore disease subtypes using our open-sourced BiomedSciAI toolkit. Applying methods available in this toolkit on the UK Biobank, including subpopulation-based feature selection and multi-dimensional subset scanning, we aimed to discover unique subgroups from GI surgery cohorts. Of a 12,073-patient cohort, a subgroup of 440 IBD patients was discovered with an increased risk of a subsequent GI surgery (OR: 2.21, 95% CI [1.81-2.69]). We iteratively demonstrate the discovery process using an additional cohort (with a narrower definition of GI surgery). Our results show that the iterative process can refine the subgroup discovery process and generate novel hypotheses to investigate determinants of treatment response.