Practical approach for disease similarity calculation based on disease phenotype, etiology, and locational clues in disease names

Disease similarity is a useful measure to improve clinical decision support systems wherein it allows continuous presentation of similar diseases. In a previous study, we demonstrated that etiological and symptomatic information of diseases provide a reasonable approximation for the similarity of diseases. This study extends the previously proposed approach by incorporating the locational information of diseases, which may improve the performance against the baseline achieved only by the etiological and symptomatic features.