Liver guide for monitoring of chronic hepatitis C.

The severity of chronic hepatitis C infection in the individual patient is monitored using blood laboratory findings and liver biopsy. If blood test results could be shown to provide sufficient information concerning the disease, the invasive procedure of liver biopsy could perhaps be avoided in some instances. This study assessed the clinical relevance of blood laboratory tests for detecting disease-related changes in the liver. Histopathological classification was used to assign class membership of the patients and data mining operations were performed in an elaborate way on 19 different data sets. Disease activity could be detected by a small set of blood tests. Extended sets could identify more severe changes, but failed to distinguish them. The extracted rules are implemented as a part of the knowledge base of a corresponding decision support system aimed at specialists and general practitioners.