Discriminating Tuberculous Pleural Effusion from Malignant Pleural Effusion Based on Routine Pleural Fluid Biomarkers, Using Mathematical Methods.

BACKGROUND: The differential diagnosis of tuberculous pleural effusion (TPE) and malignant pleural effusion (MPE) is difficult because the biochemical profiles are similar. The present study aimed to differentiate TPE from MPE, using a decision tree and a weighted sparse representation-based classification (WSRC) method, based on the best combination of routine pleural effusion fluid biomarkers. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The routine biomarkers of pleural fluid, including differential cell count, lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), protein, glucose and adenosine deaminase (ADA), were measured in 236 patients (100 with TPE and 136 with MPE). A Sequential Forward Selection (SFS) algorithm was employed to obtain the best combination of parameters for the classification of pleural effusions. Moreover, WSRC was compared to the standard sparse representation-based classification (SRC) and the Support Vector Machine (SVM) methods for classification accuracy. RESULTS: ADA provided the highest diagnostic performance in differentiating TPE from MPE, with 91.91% sensitivity and 74.0% specificity. The best combination of parameters for discriminating TPE from MPE included age, ADA, polynuclear leukocytes and lymphocytes. WSRC outperformed the SRC and SVM methods, with an area under the curve of 0.877, sensitivity of 93.38%, and specificity of 82.0%. The generated flowchart of the decision tree demonstrated 87.2% accuracy for discriminating TPE from MPE. CONCLUSION: This study indicates that a decision tree and a WSRC are novel, noninvasive, and inexpensive methods, which can be useful in discriminating between TPE and MPE, based on the combination of routine pleural fluid biomarkers.

Classification of Asthma Based on Nonlinear Analysis of Breathing Pattern.

Normal human breathing exhibits complex variability in both respiratory rhythm and volume. Analyzing such nonlinear fluctuations may provide clinically relevant information in patients with complex illnesses such as asthma. We compared the cycle-by-cycle fluctuations of inter-breath interval (IBI) and lung volume (LV) among healthy volunteers and patients with various types of asthma. Continuous respiratory datasets were collected from forty age-matched men including 10 healthy volunteers, 10 patients with controlled atopic asthma, 10 patients with uncontrolled atopic asthma, and 10 patients with uncontrolled non-atopic asthma during 60 min spontaneous breathing. Complexity of breathing pattern was quantified by calculating detrended fluctuation analysis, largest Lyapunov exponents, sample entropy, and cross-sample entropy. The IBI as well as LV fluctuations showed decreased long-range correlation, increased regularity and reduced sensitivity to initial conditions in patients with asthma, particularly in uncontrolled state. Our results also showed a strong synchronization between the IBI and LV in patients with uncontrolled asthma. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis showed that nonlinear analysis of breathing pattern has a diagnostic value in asthma and can be used in differentiating uncontrolled from controlled and non-atopic from atopic asthma. We suggest that complexity analysis of breathing dynamics may represent a novel physiologic marker to facilitate diagnosis and management of patients with asthma. However, future studies are needed to increase the validity of the study and to improve these novel methods for better patient management.