Patent Document ID: 9563744
Application ID: 14949229
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for assessing a risk of a patient receiving a transplant of pluripotent hematopoietic stem cells (PHSC) or bone marrow developing graft-versus-host disease or characterizing such disease, comprising the steps of: (a) performing MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry on a blood-based sample obtained from the patient after the PHSC or bone marrow transplant by subjecting the sample to at least 100,000 laser shots and acquiring mass spectral data; (b) obtaining integrated intensity values in the mass spectral data of a multitude of pre-determined mass-spectral features; and (c) operating on the mass spectral data with a programmed computer implementing a classifier configured as a combination of filtered mini-classifiers using a regularized combination method, wherein in the operating step the classifier compares the integrated intensity values with feature values of a training set of class-labeled mass spectral data obtained from a multitude of patients having received a transplant of PHSC or bone marrow with the values obtained in step (b) with a classification algorithm and generates a class label for the sample, wherein the class label is associated with the risk of a patient providing the sample developing graft-versus-host disease or characterizing the graft-versus-host disease.