Background:We investigated which factors predicted the risk of in-hospital mortality in a general population of cancer patients with non-terminal disease and whether employing the genetic algorithm technique would be useful in this regard.Material/Methods: A total of 201 cancer patients, including all cases of in-hospital mortality over a 2-year period, as well as a control group of subjects discharged during the same period, all having an Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) performance status of of ?3 at the time of admission, were retrospectively evaluated. Indicators of in-hospital mortality were determined by multivariate logistic regression, recursive partitioning analysis, neural network, and genetic algorithm (GA) techniques. The performance of the different techniques were compared by a number of measures, including receiver operating curve (ROC) analysis.Results: All four analysis methods selected a combination of six explanatory variables to explain the risk of in-hospital mortality: lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), alanine transaminase (ALT), hemoglobin (Hb), white blood cell counts (Wbc), type of cancer, and reason for admission. Compared with the other 3 methods, GA selected the least number of explanatory variables, i.e. LDH and reason for admission, with similar fraction of cases explained (78.6%), and yielded a fitness score of 0.52.Conclusions: LDH is an important indicator of in-hospital mortality for hospitalized cancer patients not in terminal stage. GA reliably predicted in-hospital mortality and was shown to be as efficient as the other data mining techniques employed in this study. Its use in a clinical setting for prognostication in oncology appears promising.

Keywords: Alanine Transaminase - blood, Hospitalization - statistics & numerical data, Adolescent, Aged, 80 and over, Alanine Transaminase - blood, Algorithms, Biological Markers - blood, Hospital Mortality, Hospitalization - statistics & numerical data, L-Lactate Dehydrogenase - metabolism, Neoplasms - mortality, Survival Rate