Building Prognostic Models for Breast Cancer Patients Using Clinical Variables and Gene Expression Signatures

Our findings indicate that the integration of expression signatures and clinicopathological factors can better determine the individual risk of recurrence for newly diagnosed patients with lymph-node negative ER-positive breast cancer. Models incorporating other variables yet to be discovered will be needed to obtain robust prognostic models for ER-negative and HER2-positive breast cancer patients. A large data set was created by combining five different publicly available microarray datasets of node-negative breast cancer patients treated with local therapy only. The microarray gene expression data was combined using the batch effect adjustment by the Distance Weighted Discrimination method.