Table 2.

List of pretreatment clinical variables with a short description. NAC, neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Reprinted from: Mani S, Chen Y, Arlinghaus LR, Li X, Chakravarthy AB, Bhave SR, Welch EB, Levy MA, Yankeelov TE. Early prediction of the response of breast tumors to neoadjuvant chemotherapy using quantitative MRI and machine learning. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2011; 2011:868–77.

Clinical variable	Description
Age	Age at the time of diagnosis
ER+	Estrogen receptor
PR+	Progesterone receptor
HER2+	Human epidermal growth factor receptor
Clinical Grade	Pretreatment clinical grade
Proliferative rate	No of cells in mitosis per 10 high power fields
Nodal status	Pathologically confirmed by fine needle aspiration or sentinel node evaluation
Clinical-T	Pretreatment clinical size based on clinical imaging (ie, physical examination, ultrasound, mammogram, conventional MRI) judged to be most accurate for each case. In patients in whom these measurements were discordant, the most reliable measurement (as deemed by the treating physician) was utilized to determine tumor size before chemotherapy
Clinical-N	Pretreatment nodal stage based on pathologically confirmed by fine needle aspiration of node or sentinel evaluation
Clinical stage	Staging of the breast cancer before initiation of NAC. Clinical staging includes physical examination as well as standard imaging including ultrasound, mammogram and clinical MRI
Physical examination	Longest diameter by physical examination (cm)