Research Article Identifying the Association Rules between Clinicopathologic Factors and Higher Survival Performance in Operation-Centric Oral Cancer Patients Using the Apriori Algorithm

Copyright © 2013 Jen-Yang Tang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This study computationally determines the contribution of clinicopathologic factors correlated with 5-year survival in oral squa-mous cell carcinoma (OSCC) patients primarily treated by surgical operation (OP) followed by other treatments. From 2004 to 2010, the program enrolled 493 OSCC patients at the Kaohsiung Medical Hospital University. The clinicopathologic records were retrospectively reviewed and compared for survival analysis. The Apriori algorithm was applied to mine the association rules between these factors and improved survival. Univariate analysis of demographic data showed that grade/differentiation, clinical tumor size, pathology tumor size, and OP grouping were associated with survival longer than 36 months. Using the Aprior