Patent ID: 7707134

Claim:
A method of diagnosing depression comprising the steps of: providing surface-enhanced laser desorption/ionisation mass spectrometric (SELDI-MS) data of a plurality of proteins, said data obtained from a patient and comprising a plurality of peak values; and analysing said peak values with an alternating decision tree trained for diagnosing depression comprising a set of base rules, wherein a base rule is a mapping from a data value instance to a real number prediction defined in terms of a precondition C 1 , a base condition C 2 , and two real number values a and b, wherein said alternating decision tree maps each data value instance to a real valued prediction which is the sum of the predictions of the base rules in its set, and a classification of an instance is the sign of the prediction, wherein said real valued prediction is predictive of depression if said sum of the prediction values of said tree is greater than 1.0.