Discovering biomarkers for myocardial infarction from SELDI-TOF spectra

Abstract

We describe a three-step procedure to separate patients with myocardial infarction from a control group based on SELDI-TOF mass spectra. The procedure returns features ("biomarkers") that are strongly present in one of the two groups. These features should allow future subjects to be classified as at-risk of myocardial infarction. The algorithm uses morphological operations to reduce noise in the input data as well as for performing baseline correction. In contrast to previous approaches on SELDI-TOF spectra, we avoid black-box machine learning procedures and use only features (protein masses) that are easy to interpret.