KDDRG - Medical Data Analysis

WPI Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Computer Science Department
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Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Research Group 
KDDRG

Research Projects on
Data Mining for Medical Data Analysis 

Description | Sleep Analysis | Pancreatic Cancer

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GENERAL DESCRIPTION

This collection of collaborative research projects between computer scientists and medical doctors involve data collection and methodology development for the analysis of medical data.

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EXPLORATORY ANALYSIS OF SLEEP DATA

Project Members

Project Description

In this MS thesis we develop data mining techniques to analyze sleep irregularities in humans. We investigate the effects of several demographic, behavioral and emotional factors on sleep progression and on patients' susceptibility to sleep-related and other disorders. Mining is performed over subjective and objective data collected from patients visiting the UMass Medical Center and the Day Kimball Hospital for treatment. Subjective data are obtained from patient responses to questions posed in a sleep questionnaire. Objective data comprise observations and clinical measurements recorded by sleep technicians using a suite of instruments together called polysomnogram. We create suitable filters to capture significant events within sleep epochs. We propose and employ a Window-based Association Rule Mining Algorithm to discover associations among sleep progression, pathology, demographics and other factors. This algorithm is a modified and extended version of the Set-and-Sequences Association Rule Mining Algorithm developed at WPI to support the mining of association rules from complex data types. We analyze both the medical as well as the statistical significance of the associations discovered by our algorithm. We also develop predictive classification models using logistic regression and compare the results with those obtained through association rule mining.

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"MINING ONCOLOGY DATA: Knowledge Discovery in Clinical Performance of Cancer Patients"

Project Members

Project Description

Our goal in this work is twofold: to develop clinical performance databases of cancer patients, and to conduct data mining and machine learning studies on collected patient records. We use these studies to develop models for predicting cancer patient medical outcomes. The clinical database is developed in conjunction with surgeons and oncologists at the U. Massachusetts Medical School. Aspects of the database design and representation of patient narrative are discussed here. Current predictive model design in medical literature is dominated by linear and logistic regression techniques. We seek to show that novel machine learning methods can perform as well or better than these traditional techniques. Our machine learning focus for this thesis is on pancreatic cancer patients. Classification and regression prediction targets include patient survival, wellbeing scores, and disease characteristics. Information research in oncology is often constrained by type variation, missing attributes, high dimensionality, skewed class distribution, and small data sets. We compensate for these difficulties using preprocessing, meta-learning, and other algorithmic methods during data analysis. The predictive accuracy and regression error of various machine learning models are presented as results, as are t-tests comparing these to the accuracy of traditional regression methods. In most cases, it is shown that the novel machine learning prediction methods offer comparable or superior performance. We conclude with an analysis of results and discussion of future research possibilities.

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