About Pyrexia

The data

Zhou X, Menche J, Barabási A-L, Sharma A. Human symptoms–disease network. Nature Communications 5, 4212 (2014). doi.org/10.1038/ncomms5212

This game would not exist without that paper. The authors mined PubMed records and MeSH terms to link symptoms with diseases, and shared the results as supplementary data. Thank you to them.

How the game uses the data

Warmth comes from how diseases appear together with symptoms in the literature up to 2014. It is a study aid, not a clinical judgement, so some readings will surprise you.

Compares symptom profiles

Each disease has a weighted symptom profile. Similarity is the cosine between two profiles, the method the paper uses, with PubMed counts damped so one frequent term can't dominate.

Reduces generic symptoms

Fatigue, headache, nausea, fever and similar symptoms count for a quarter of their usual weight. A few terms that aren't clues, such as body weight, are left out.

Turns rank into warmth

Top scores vary between diseases, so warmth uses rank. The closest 1% of diseases are hot and the next 9% are warm.

Lights the body

Each shared symptom glows where it shows on the body. That map was placed by hand for this game and isn't part of the published network, so treat it as a memory aid rather than anatomy.

Writes the hints by hand

The classic presentation hints and the 30-day exam track were written and chosen by hand for this game, from standard teaching. They aren't from the published network, and they aren't medical advice.

The 311 hidden diseases were chosen by hand as high-yield topics across NEET PG, INICET, PLAB, USMLE and AMC. These are not official exam lists.