Success of modern medicine depends on proper use of detailed information about a patient and disease. While these data are hypothesis generating, they are still interpreted by hypothesis testing, a consequence of “All controversial ideas are equally possible” principle of clinical research. We replaced it by maximal entropy-principle based approach.
SYNTAX score is an angiographic tool for grading the complexity of coronary artery disease, and is used to support treatment decissions (Percutaneous coronary intervention vs. Coronary artery bypass grafting) .
Fisher information provides tools to derive laws, underlying observed data distributions. In cancer, the power law for tumor growth is derived by answering the question, what is the mathematical function, consistent with histogram of tumor masses, determined from CT images of liver cancer patients. The starting point of finding the solution is "just" a general requirement that CT scan data reflect maximal information about underlying cancer-related biological processes. All necessary input is obtained from standard practice data, the result is therefore a clinically relevant survival prediction method with added mechanistic insight into tumorigenesis. Preprint of paper to appear in 2014 Seminars in Oncology is here. Easy to use Excel worksheet implementation of survival prognosis for HCC patients by the method described in our paper can be downloaded here. Please make sure that you enable worksheet editing after opening it or downloading, as your computer might set it into "Read only" status, preventing data entry.
Clinical applications: Identification of aggressive liver tumors, risk of bleeding after stent insertion, depression prediction from metabolic syndrome data, identification of long/short survival of melanoma patients from CTLA-4 genotype, prediction of long/short survival of lung cancer and chemotherapy response for melanoma patients using pathway-based genotypes, prediction of cleft malformation using optimized risk factor pattern networks, ...
Which polymorphism is damaging for gene function? Which one is compensatory? What mechanism associates variants in non-coding DNA to disease? Why rare genetic variations lead to serious health problems? Entromics provides quantitative answers to all these questions by evaluating the entropy of variant incorporation into personal genome.
