An information-theoretical model for breast cancer detection.
OBJECTIVE
Formal diagnostic modeling is an important line of modern biological and medical research. The construction of a formal diagnostic model consists of two stages: first, the estimation of correlation between model parameters and the disease under consideration; and second, the construction of a diagnostic decision rule using these correlation estimates. A serious drawback of current diagnostic models is the absence of a unified mathematical methodological approach to implementing these two stages. The absence of a unified approach makes the theoretical/biomedical substantiation of diagnostic rules difficult and reduces the efficacy of actual diagnostic model application.


METHODS
The present study constructs a formal model for breast cancer detection. The diagnostic model is based on information theory. Normalized mutual information is chosen as the measure of relevance between parameters and the patterns studied. The "nearest neighbor" rule is utilized for diagnosis, while the distance between elements is the weighted Hamming distance. The model concomitantly employs cellular fluorescence polarization as the quantitative input parameter and cell receptor expression as qualitative parameters.


RESULTS
Twenty-four healthy individuals and 34 patients (not including the subjects analyzed for the model construction) were tested by the model. Twenty-three healthy subjects and 34 patients were correctly diagnosed.


CONCLUSIONS
The proposed diagnostic model is an open one, i.e. it can accommodate new additional parameters, which may increase its effectiveness.
Blokh
D
D
The Biophysical Interdisciplinary Jerome Schottenstein Center for the Research and the Technology of the Cellome, Physics Department, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan 52900, Israel.
Zurgil
N
N
Stambler
I
I
Afrimzon
E
E
Shafran
Y
Y
Korech
E
E
Sandbank
J
J
Deutsch
M
M
D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis*; D005260:Female; D005454:Fluorescence Polarization; D006801:Humans; D007257:Information Theory; D015233:Models, Statistical