Heterogeneous data fusion for brain tumor classification

Current research in biomedical informatics involves analysis of multiple heterogeneous data sets. This includes patient demographics, clinical and pathology data, treatment history, patient outcomes as well as gene expression, DNA sequences and other information sources such as gene ontology. Analysis of these data sets could lead to better disease diagnosis, prognosis, treatment and drug discovery. In this report, we present a novel machine learning framework for brain tumor classification based on heterogeneous data fusion of metabolic and molecular datasets, including state-of-the-art high-resolution magic angle spinning (HRMAS) proton (H-1) magnetic resonance spectroscopy and gene transcriptome profiling, obtained from intact brain tumor biopsies. Our experimental results show that our novel framework outperforms any analysis using individual dataset.