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Background With advances in digital health technologies and proliferation of biomedical data in recent years, applications of machine learning in health care and medicine have gained considerable attention. While inpatient settings are equipped to generate rich clinical data from patients, there is a dearth of actionable information that can be used for pursuing secondary research for specific clinical conditions. Objective This study focused on applying unsupervised machine learning techniques for traumatic brain injury (TBI), which is the leading cause of death and disability among children and adults aged less than 44 years. Specifically, we present a case study to demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of subspace clustering techniques for extracting patterns from data collected from TBI patients. Methods Data for this study were obtained from the Progesterone for Traumatic Brain Injury, Experimental Clinical Treatment–Phase III (PROTECT III) trial, which included a cohort of 882 TBI patients. We applied subspace-clustering methods (density-based, cell-based, and clustering-oriented methods) to this data set and compared the performance of the different clustering methods. Results The analyses showed the following three clusters of laboratory physiological data: (1) international normalized ratio (INR), (2) INR, chloride, and creatinine, and (3) hemoglobin and hematocrit. While all subclustering algorithms hadmore »a reasonable accuracy in classifying patients by mortality status, the density-based algorithm had a higher F1 score and coverage. Conclusions Clustering approaches serve as an important step for phenotype definition and validation in clinical domains such as TBI, where patient and injury heterogeneity are among the major reasons for failure of clinical trials. The results from this study provide a foundation to develop scalable clustering algorithms for further research and validation.« less