In a dataset of 423 patients who had had radical prostatectomy for localised prostate cancer we estimated the apparent Shannon information (ASI) about time to biochemical recurrence in various subsets of the available pre-op variables using a Bayesian Gamma-power-mixture survival regression model. In all the subsets examined the ASI was positive with posterior probability greater than 0.975 . Using only age and results of pre-operative blood tests (PSA and biomarkers) we achieved 0.232 (0.180 to 0.290) nats ASI (0.335 (0.260 to 0.419) bits) (posterior mean and equitailed 95% posterior confidence intervals). This is more than double the mean posterior ASI previously achieved on the same dataset by a subset of the current authors using a log-skew-Student-mixture model, and is greater than that previous value with posterior probability greater than 0.99 . Additionally using pre- or post-operative Gleason grades, operative findings, clinical stage, and presence or absence of extraprostatic extension or seminal vesicle invasion did not increase the ASI extracted. However removing the blood-based biomarkers and replacing them with either pre-operative Gleason grades or findings available from MRI scanning greatly reduced the available ASI to respectively 0.077 (0.038 to 0.120) and 0.088 (0.045 to 0.132) nats (both less than the values using blood-based biomarkers with posterior probability greater than 0.995). A greedy approach to selection of the best biomarkers gave TGFbeta1, VCAM1, IL6sR, and uPA in descending order of importance from those examined.

翻译：在423例局限性前列腺癌根治术患者的数据集中，我们采用贝叶斯伽马幂混合生存回归模型，估计了术前可用变量各子集关于生化复发时间的表观香农信息（ASI）。在所有检验的子集中，ASI均为正值，后验概率大于0.975。仅使用年龄和术前血液检测结果（PSA和生物标志物），我们获得了0.232（0.180至0.290）纳特（0.335（0.260至0.419）比特）的ASI（后验均值及等尾95%后验置信区间）。这一结果比同一数据集上由部分现有作者采用对数偏斜学生t混合模型先前实现的后验均值ASI高出两倍以上，且后验概率大于0.99。然而，使用术前或术后Gleason分级、手术发现、临床分期、以及有无前列腺外扩展或精囊侵犯，并未增加所提取的ASI。但移除血液生物标志物并分别替换为术前Gleason分级或MRI扫描可获得的结果，则使可用ASI大幅降低至0.077（0.038至0.120）和0.088（0.045至0.132）纳特（两者均小于使用血液生物标志物所获值，后验概率大于0.995）。采用贪心方法筛选最佳生物标志物，按重要性降序排列为TGFbeta1、VCAM1、IL6sR和uPA。