Automatic preoperative classification of carcinoma of the colon and rectum.

The Dukes' and TNM systems for staging carcinoma of the colon and rectum are still the best pathologic classifications, but they do not apply to all patients and do not distinguish between patients who will die and patients who will be cured by the same therapeutic procedure. A new approach to this problem should be to establish a biochemical automatic classification, complementary to the morphologic one, which allow us to classify every patient before and after the first and subsequent treatments. By using several nonspecific tumor markers, such as CEA, AAT, AF, AAG, GGT and transferrine, a discriminant analysis was executed among the groups of patients with LD, RD and DD.