Diagnostic tools for differentiating pleural mesothelioma from lung adenocarcinoma in paraffin embedded tissue. II. Design of an expert system and its application to the diagnosis of mesothelioma.
A panel of 14 antibodies (panepithelial antibody Lu-5, anti-keratin-18, anti-keratin-7, Ber-EP4, anti-Leu-M1, HEA-125, anti-carcinoembryonic antigen, anti-blood group-related antigens A, B, H, B72.3, anti-placental alkaline phosphatase, anti-vimentin and BMA-120), which have been evaluated for use in differentiating mesothelioma from lung adenocarcinoma, was applied to a group of 24 suspected mesotheliomas. Using the established qualitative, descriptive criteria derived from monovariate statistical analysis of the tumour control groups (definite mesotheliomas, adenocarcinomas), a definitive allocation was possible in only 25% of suspected cases. We therefore constructed two "expert systems", based on multivariate discriminant analysis with either the ALLOC 80 program for ordinal data or a newly developed analysis program for binomial data. With these two systems diagnostic allocation of suspected mesotheliomas was improved to 75% and 79%. The use of binomial data ("positive" versus "negative") in conjunction with the probability-based test system is of particular interest because the primary data are easy to record and the test results have a higher statistical probability.
Moch
H
H
Department of Pathology, University of Basel, Switzerland.
Oberholzer
M
M
Christen
H
H
Buser
M
M
Dalquen
P
P
Wegmann
W
W
Gudat
F
F
D000230:Adenocarcinoma / Q000737:chemistry / Q000175:diagnosis*; D014408:Biomarkers, Tumor / Q000032:analysis*; D003658:Decision Making, Computer-Assisted; D003937:Diagnosis, Differential; D016002:Discriminant Analysis; D005103:Expert Systems; D006801:Humans; D008175:Lung Neoplasms / Q000737:chemistry / Q000175:diagnosis*; D008654:Mesothelioma / Q000737:chemistry / Q000175:diagnosis*; D016612:Paraffin Embedding; D010997:Pleural Neoplasms / Q000737:chemistry / Q000175:diagnosis*
D014408:Biomarkers, Tumor