Introduction
Understanding patients’ everyday experience is essential to improve patient centered care in sarcoidosis. So far, patient perspectives are based on survey- and qualitative research.

Aim
We aimed to assess patient-driven perspectives on their care trajectories using a novel machine learning-driven approach (MLD).

Methods
We used the largest Dutch sarcoidosis patient platform as the data source of patient stories. The patients’ stories were extracted with permission. We applied topic modelling (to generate topics among the posts), and sentiment analysis (to find tone of voice in the topics). To validate the findings, we read the top 50 most relevant posts of each topic. An in-depth patients’ disease trajectory map was made.

Results
Based on 4969 forum posts, 30 final topics and 10 upper themes were generated, which formed the basis for the “patient journey-map” which shows patients’ perspective across the care pathway. Important decision moments could be identified, as well as care “tracks” at home and hospital and topics associated with positive or negative emotions. Most patients’ perspectives were about symptoms (mainly negative sentiment), disease-modifying medication (mainly neutral sentiment), and quality of life (negative, neutral and positive).

Discussion
A major part of living with sarcoidosis takes place outside the view of the hospital, but this part often remains invisible. MLD is an innovative approach, providing a comprehensive overview of patients’ perspectives on health and care. Integrating, these findings in the design of health care delivery has the potential to improve patient-centered care.

Clinicians increasingly pay attention to Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve the quality and timeliness of their services. There are converging opinions on the need for Explainable AI (XAI) in healthcare. However, prior work considers explanations as stationary entities with no account for the temporal dynamics of patient care. In this work, we involve 16 Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) clinicians from a European university medical centre and investigate their evolving uses and purposes for explainability throughout patient care. By applying a patient journey map for IPF, we elucidate clinicians' informational needs, how human agency and patient-specific conditions can influence the interaction with XAI systems, and the content, delivery, and relevance of explanations over time. We discuss implications for integrating XAI in clinical contexts and more broadly how explainability is defined and evaluated. Furthermore, we reflect on the role of medical education in addressing epistemic challenges related to AI literacy.

Electronic nose (eNose) technology is an emerging diagnostic application, using artificial intelligence to classify human breath patterns. These patterns can be used to diagnose medical conditions. Sarcoidosis is an often difficult to diagnose disease, as no standard procedure or conclusive test exists. An accurate diagnostic model based on eNose data could therefore be helpful in clinical decision-making. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the performance of various dimensionality reduction methods and classifiers in order to design an accurate diagnostic model for sarcoidosis. Various methods of dimensionality reduction and multiple hyperparameter optimised classifiers were tested and cross-validated on a dataset of patients with pulmonary sarcoidosis (n= 224) and other interstitial lung disease (n= 317). Best performing methods were selected to create a model to diagnose patients with sarcoidosis. Nested cross-validation was applied to calculate the overall diagnostic performance. A classification model with feature selection and random forest (RF) classifier showed the highest accuracy. The overall diagnostic performance resulted in an accuracy of 87.1% and area-under-the-curve of 91.2%. After comparing different dimensionality reduction methods and classifiers, a highly accurate model to diagnose a patient with sarcoidosis using eNose data was created. The RF classifier and feature selection showed the best performance. The presented systematic approach could also be applied to other eNose datasets to compare methods and select the optimal diagnostic model.