Big-Data Analysis, Cluster Analysis, and Machine-Learning Approaches

Medicine will experience many changes in the coming years because the so-called "medicine of the future" will be increasingly proactive, featuring four basic elements: predictive, personalized, preventive, and participatory. Drivers for these changes include the digitization of data in medicine and the availability of computational tools that deal with massive volumes of data. Thus, the need to apply machine-learning methods to medicine has increased dramatically in recent years while facing challenges related to an unprecedented large number of clinically relevant features and highly specific diagnostic tests. Advances regarding data-storage technology and the progress concerning genome studies have enabled collecting vast amounts of patient clinical details, thus permitting the extraction of valuable information. In consequence, big-data analytics is becoming a mandatory technology to be used in the clinical domain. Machine learning and big-data analytics can be used in the field of cardiology, for example, for the prediction of individual risk factors for cardiovascular disease, for clinical decision support, and for practicing precision medicine using genomic information. Several projects employ machine-learning techniques to address the problem of classification and prediction of heart failure (HF) subtypes and unbiased clustering analysis using dense phenomapping to identify phenotypically distinct HF categories. In this chapter, these ideas are further presented, and a computerized model allowing the distinction between two major HF phenotypes on the basis of ventricular-volume data analysis is discussed in detail.