Fig. 1

Flowchart of membership degree exploration methodology. Schematic representation of the method that was used for exploration of the population’s membership degrees (‘memberships’) for the clusters, in order to identify relevant subgroups. A membership ≥ 80% was regarded as such a strong membership, that we considered these patients as fully belonging to that cluster. A membership <20% was considered an insignificant membership. A subgroup was considered as potentially clinically relevant if it contained 100 or more patients. The described method of the flowchart is explained in detail in the method section of this paper