Health Discovery Corporation Receives Notice of Acceptance of Australian Patent Application Covering Biomarker Selection Using SVMs

Business Wire, August 20, 2007

SAVANNAH, Ga. -- Health Discovery Corporation (HDC) (OTCBB:HDVY) today announced that IP Australia, the Australian patent office, has published the Notice of Acceptance of HDC's patent application covering the use of recursive feature elimination in support vector machines (RFE-SVM) for identification of determinative genes for diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of disease. RFE-SVM is a mathematical selection/filtering process that successively eliminates the least important of many data features, then ranks each of the most significant of the relatively few features remaining for simultaneous use in classifying the data using SVMs. The most significant benefit is an increase in the accuracy and usefulness of the classification results, particularly when analyzing voluminous data, such as that encountered during the analysis of genetic and proteomic data.

The accepted claims in the application include coverage of specific genetic biomarkers identified using RFE-SVM for diagnosing prostate cancer and for separating benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH) from prostate cancer. Following issuance, this will be HDC's second Australian patent covering the RFE-SVM method for analysis of data.

The RFE method was first reported in 2002 in an article by authors Isabelle Guyon and Vladimir Vapnik, both members of HDC's Scientific Advisory Board, Stephen Barnhill, HDC's Chairman and CEO, and Jason Weston. The article, entitled "Gene Selection for Cancer Classification Using Support Vector Machines," published in the journal Machine Learning, has been widely cited in subsequent publications, recognizing the significance of the RFE method within the SVM field.

"We are very excited to receive yet another international patent Notice of Acceptance," said Stephen D. Barnhill, M.D., HDC's Chairman and CEO. "The continued international expansion of our patent portfolio adds significantly to the increasing value of the HDC patent portfolio."

Once IP Australia issues the new RFE-SVM patent, Health Discovery Corporation will hold the exclusive rights to 27 issued U.S. and foreign patents covering uses of SVM and FGM (fractal genomics modeling) technology for discovery of knowledge from large data sets. Other issued patents cover methods and systems for pre-processing of data to enhance knowledge discovery using SVMs, analysis of data using multiple support vector machines and for multiple data sets, and providing SVM analysis services over the Internet. HDC's pending U.S. and foreign patent applications cover numerous improvements to and applications of SVMs including computer-aided image analysis using SVMs, with particular application to diagnosis using medical images, methods of feature selection for enhanced SVM efficiency and biomarkers for colon cancer, prostate cancer, BPH and renal cancer discovered with these methods, and use of SVMs for analysis of spectral data, such as mass spectrometry data used for protein analysis.

Savannah-based Health Discovery Corporation (OTCBB:HDVY) is uniquely positioned in the field of pattern recognition technology. Through the application of its patent protected technology, HDC is a biology-oriented biomarker discovery company providing all aspects of First-Phase Biomarker Discovery(sm). The Company's SVM and FGM pattern recognition tools have significant application potential in other sizable commercial markets such as radiology, financial markets, Internet search and spam, homeland security, and other areas where analysis of large volumes of complex data is required.