Efficacy of interferon treatment for chronic hepatitis C predicted by feature subset selection and support vector machine.

Chronic hepatitis C is a disease that is difficult to treat. At present, interferon might be the only drug, which can cure this kind of disease, but its efficacy is limited and patients face the risk of side effects and high expense, so doctors considering interferon must make a serious choice. The purpose of this study is to establish a simple model and use the clinical data to predict the interferon efficacy.

Support vector machine-based feature selection for classification of liver fibrosis grade in chronic hepatitis C.

Although liver biopsy is currently regarded as the gold standard for staging liver fibrosis in chronic hepatitis C, it is a costly invasive procedure and carries a small risk for complication. Our aim in this study was to construct a simple model to distinguish between patients with no or mild fibrosis (METAVIR F0-F1) versus those with clinically significant fibrosis (METAVIR F2-F4). We retrospectively studied 204 consecutive CHC patients.