A MATLAB Toolbox for Classification and Visualization of Heterogenous Multi-Scale Human Data Using the Disease State Fingerprint Method

As the amount of data acquired from humans is constantly increasing, efficient tools are needed for extracting relevant information from this data. This paper presents a Matlab implementation of a method to classify and visually explore (highly) multi-variate patient data. The method uses the so-called Disease State Index (DSI) which measures the fit of a test subject's data to two classes present in the data (e.g. 'controls' and 'positives'). DSI values of the different variables measured from a patient can be combined and visualized in a tree-like form using the Disease State Fingerprint (DSF) method. This allows a researcher to explore and understand the relevance of the different variables in classification problems. Moreover, the method is robust with respect to missing data. After giving an introduction to the DSF and DSI methods, the paper describes the steps required to use the methods and presents a MATLAB toolbox to perform these steps. To demonstrate the methods' versatility, the paper illustrates the usage of the toolbox in a few different contexts in which personal health data is to be classified. With this implementation, a powerful and flexible tool is made available to the biomedical research community.