Accuracy of risk scores for patients with chronic hepatitis B receiving entecavir treatment.

Background & Aims: Little is known about the validity of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) risk scores derived from treatment-naïve patients with chronic hepatitis B for patients treated with entecavir.

Methods: We performed a retrospective-prospective cohort study of 1531 patients with chronic hepatitis B (age, 51 ± 12 years; 1099 male; 332 with clinical cirrhosis) who were treated with entecavir 0.5 mg daily for at least 12 months at Prince of Wales Hospital in Hong Kong from December 2005 to August 2012.

Data mining on DNA sequences of hepatitis B virus.

Extraction of meaningful information from large experimental data sets is a key element in bioinformatics research. One of the challenges is to identify genomic markers in Hepatitis B Virus (HBV) that are associated with HCC (liver cancer) development by comparing the complete genomic sequences of HBV among patients with HCC and those without HCC. In this study, a data mining framework, which includes molecular evolution analysis, clustering, feature selection, classifier learning, and classification, is introduced.