Cancer patient flows discovery in DRG databases.

In France, cancer care is evolving to the design of regional networks, so as to coordinate expertise, services and resources allocation. Existing information systems along with data-mining tools can provide better knowledge on the distribution of patient flows. We used one year data of the French Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) based system to perform our analysis. Formal Concept Analysis has been used to build Iceberg Lattices of cancer patient flows in the French region of Lorraine. This unsupervised conceptual clustering method allowed us to describe patients flows with an easily understandable visual representation.