Brain disorders, including neurodegenerative diseases, and mental illnesses, are often
difficult to diagnose and study due to clinical and pathological heterogeneity, overlap in
clinical manifestations between disorders, and frequent comorbidities, tampering drug
development and fundamental research. Hence, there is a clear need for data-driven
approaches to disentangle these complex disorders. Here, we established a computational
pipeline to process clinical summaries from donors with a wide range of brain disorders that
were neuro-pathologically diagnosed by the Netherlands Brain Bank. First, we identified and
defined 90 cross-disorder signs and symptoms within cognitive, motor, sensory, psychiatric,
and general domains. Second, we trained and optimized natural language processing (NLP)
models to identify these signs and symptoms in individual sentences of the extensive clinical
summaries from donors of the NBB, resulting in temporal disease trajectories. Third, we
studied the temporal manifestation and survival profiles across rare and complex dementias,
alpha-synucleinopathies, frontotemporal dementia subtypes, and mental illnesses. Lastly, we
trained a recurrent neural network to predict the Neuropathological Diagnosis. Taken
together, this integrated approach resulted in a highly unique resource that can facilitate
research into cross-disorder symptomatology.