Patent ID: 7335511

Claim:
A method for obtaining a statistical classifier for classifying spectral data from a biopsy of tissue to determine the classification of a characteristic of the tissue, comprising: (a) locating a plurality of discriminatory subregions in magnetic resonance spectra of biopsies of tissue having known classifiers of a characteristic, (b) cross-validating the spectra by selecting a first portion of the spectra comprising about one-half of the spectra leaving the other one-half of the spectra in the remaining portion of the spectra, developing linear discriminant analysis classifiers from said first portion of spectra, and validating the remainder of the spectra using the classifiers from the first portion of the spectra, to obtain optimized linear discriminant analysis coefficients, (c) repeating step (b) a plurality of times, each time selecting a different portion of the spectra, to obtain a different set of optimized linear discriminant analysis coefficients for each of said plurality of times; and (d) obtaining an average of the linear discriminant analysis coefficients to obtain final classifier spectra indicating the classification of the characteristic based on the spectra, wherein spectra from a biopsy of tissue of unknown classification of a characteristic may be compared to the final classifier spectra to determine the classification of the characteristic of the tissue.