Information Technology Reference
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of cancers) is because our body lost control to the cell growth. For normal cells, their growth
is controlled by the information in their DNA. These cells know when to stop. On the other
hand, for a cancer cell (either caused by spontaneous mutation or by hereditary
predisposition), this control is lost. Thus, it will grow unchecked and with misshape.
Environment factors such as high animal fat diet, radiation exposure, Streptococcus bacterial
infection (bacteremia), inflammatory bowel disease, etc. make a person susceptible to
colorectal cancers. But these factors do not mean a person has cancer. Cells in our body have
innate ability to fight cancers. This ability is rested on the fact that normal cells have cancer
suppressing genes. For example, “the long arm of chromosome 5 (including the APC gene)”
is responsible for the suppression of one type of colon cancer (polyposis coli) development.
“The loss of this genetic material (i.e., allelic loss) results in the absence of tumor-suppressor
genes whose protein products would normally inhibit neoplastic growth.” (Kasper, 2005, p.
528) Thus, when we see a cancer, it is the result of both the presence of the environmental
risk factors and the absence of the cancer fighting genes.
7.6 Sample runs of the evidence based reasoning software
In this section, we will apply our prototype reasoning software to the case example
introduced in the previous section. To show the effect of evidence, we will show two
outputs: one with specific personal information and one without. The case information for
the one that has no specific personal information is the following:
Case 1: we use the following general information (with no specific personal information):
Suppose that the patient (Michael Dodd) is diagnosed with (HNPCC) colon cancer
stage III.
The information stored in the knowledge database is contained in Table 1.
Using the input information in case 1, we will get the default 5-year survival chance. Figure
7 is the output screen capture for case 1.
Fig. 7. A screen capture of the general 5-year survival probability for a person with colon
cancer of stage III
