Early Diagnosis Service for Latent Patients of Incurable Diseases

It is considered that many people are struggling with diseases that are difficult to cure. In general, it takes a long time to diagnose and to cure such diseases. In Japan, methods for curing 56 incurable diseases have been studied. However, methods for early diagnosis of incurable diseases have not been studied. To make early diagnoses for incurable diseases improves the quality of life of patients. This paper proposes a new service system that supports latent patients of incurable diseases by early diagnosis. For using this system, users have to prepare a text in which episodes about patients’ experiences that have been caused because of their diseases are written. The system takes such a text as input, and then the system extracts common factors among episodes, i.e., keywords appearing in several episodes. The system output the extracted keywords as keywords relating to symptoms of an incurable disease. We experimented the system and extracted keywords relating to the symptoms of retinitis pigmentosa which was one of the incurable eye diseases. Most of the symptoms relating to the extracted keywords were not known even by medical doctors. Some of them indicated symptoms in the early stage of the disease. The experiment brought us one step closer to the early diagnosis of incurable disease as one of the service systems.