Integration of clinical and microarray data with kernel methods

Currently, the clinical management of cancer is based on empirical data from the literature (clinical studies) or based on the expertise of the clinician. Recently microarray technology emerged and it has the potential to revolutionize the clinical management of cancer and other diseases. A microarray allows to measure the expression levels of thousands of genes simultaneously which may reflect diagnostic or prognostic categories and sensitivity to treatment. The objective of this paper is to investigate whether clinical data, which is the basis of day-to-day clinical decision support, can be efficiently combined with microarray data, which has yet to prove its potential to deliver patient tailored therapy, using least squares support vector machines.