Stratification of severity of illness indices: A case study for breast cancer prognosis

Abstract

Prognostic modelling involves grouping patients by risk of adverse outcome, typically by stratifying a severity of illness index obtained from a classifier or survival model. The assignment of thresholds on the risk index depends of pairwise statistical significance tests, notably the log-rank test. This paper proposes a new methodology to substantially improve the robustness of the stratification algorithm, by reference to a statistical and neural network prognostic study of longitudinal data from patients with operable breast cancer. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.