Journal article

A new scoring system in Cystic Fibrosis: statistical tools for database analysis - a preliminary report

GM Hafen, C Hurst, J Yearwood, J Smith, Z Dzalilov, PJ Robinson

BMC MEDICAL INFORMATICS AND DECISION MAKING | BMC | Published : 2008

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Cystic fibrosis is the most common fatal genetic disorder in the Caucasian population. Scoring systems for assessment of Cystic fibrosis disease severity have been used for almost 50 years, without being adapted to the milder phenotype of the disease in the 21st century. The aim of this current project is to develop a new scoring system using a database and employing various statistical tools. This study protocol reports the development of the statistical tools in order to create such a scoring system. METHODS: The evaluation is based on the Cystic Fibrosis database from the cohort at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. Initially, unsupervised clustering of the all data r..

View full abstract

Grants

Funding Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Royal Children's Cystic Fibrosis Research Trust. The authors would like to thank Armita Zarnegar, Research Assistant at the University of Ballarat, for her contribution in data preparation and data mining. We would like to thank further Bill Yeadon from "Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing" (VPAC) and Wayne Hurst, Business Development Manager at the University of Ballarat, for their contribution and coordination. Last but not least we thank Dr. Claire E. Wainwright and Kate Cuthbert from the Royal Children's Hospital in Brisbane for providing data for the test dataset.