New Machine Learning Applications to Accelerate Personalized Medicine in Breast Cancer: Rise of the Support Vector Machines

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, health care robots, and algorithms for clinical decision-making are currently being sought after in diverse fields of clinical medicine and bioengineering. The field of personalized medicine stands to benefit from new technologies so as to harness the omics big data, for example, to individualize and accelerate cancer diagnostics and therapeutics in particular. In this overarching context, breast cancer is one of the most common malignancies worldwide with multiple underlying molecular etiologies and each subtype displaying diverse clinical outcomes. Disease stratification for breast cancer is, therefore, vital to its effective and individualized clinical care. The support vector machine (SVM) is a rising machine learning approach that offers robust classification of high-dimensional big data into small numbers of data points (support vectors), achieving differentiation of subgroups in a short amount of time. Considering the rapid timelines required for both diagnosis and treatment of most aggressive cancers, this new machine learning technique has important clinical and public applications and implications for high-throughput data analysis and contextualization. This expert review describes and examines, first, the SVM models employed to forecast breast cancer subtypes using diverse systems science data, including transcriptomics, epigenetics, proteomics, and radiomics, as well as biological pathway, clinical, pathological, and biochemical data. Then, we compare the performance of the present SVM and other diagnostic and therapeutic prediction models across the data types. We conclude by emphasizing that data integration is a critical bottleneck in systems science, cancer research and development, and health care innovation and that SVM and machine learning approaches offer new solutions and ways forward in biomedical, bioengineering, and clinical applications.