Differentiation of Benign and Malignant Breast Tumors by Logistic Regression and a Classification Tree using Doppler flow signals

W. Sauerbrei; H. Madjar; H. J. Prömpeler

doi:10.1055/s-0038-1634530

Methods of Information in Medicine, Table of Contents

Methods Inf Med 1998; 37(03): 226-234
DOI: 10.1055/s-0038-1634530

Original Article

Schattauer GmbH

Differentiation of Benign and Malignant Breast Tumors by Logistic Regression and a Classification Tree using Doppler flow signals

Authors

W. Sauerbrei

¹Institute of Medical Biometry and Informatics
H. Madjar

²Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics; University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
H. J. Prömpeler

²Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics; University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

Abstract

In breast examinations with Doppler, an increased flow is found in malignant tumors. With the relatively new color Doppler, we measured different flow values in 133 cancer patients and in 325 women with benign disease. These measurements were used to develop diagnostic rules. For the highly correlated flow values, we used a stepwise procedure to select a final logistic regression model and a tree-based approach, which is a different way of modeling. With both approaches we developed simple diagnostic rules of which the sensitivity and the specificity exceeded 90%. There are no differences between the two approaches concerning discriminative ability. As complex statistical modeling leads to an overoptimism in the assessment of the error rates, we applied sensitivity analysis, investigated the stability of the selected logistic regression model, and estimated the magnitude of the overoptimism of the diagnostic rules with resampling methods. The results indicate that the estimates of sensitivity and specificity are probably close to realistic values for a clinical setting.

Keywords

Diagnostic Rules - Logistic Regression - Tree-based Approach - Breast Tumor - Resampling

Full Text

References

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