GBM

Abbreviation with 2 meanings

GBM
Stands forGlioblastoma multiforme
Meanings2
CategoriesMedical, Technology & Computing

GBM has two meanings. It stands for Glioblastoma multiforme (hematology and oncology) or Gradient boosting machine (artificial intelligence).

Meanings of GBM at a glance

#GBM stands forContext
1Glioblastoma multiformeMedical › Hematology and Oncology
2Gradient boosting machineTechnology & Computing › Artificial Intelligence

1. Glioblastoma multiforme

Medical · Hematology and Oncology Abbreviations

Most common and aggressive malignant primary brain tumor in adults, growing rapidly and infiltrating surrounding brain so that complete removal is impossible. Symptoms include headaches, seizures, personality change and progressive weakness or speech problems.

Example: Ring-enhancing right temporal mass; resection pathology: GBM, IDH-wildtype, MGMT methylated.

Standard treatment since 2005 is the Stupp protocol: maximal safe surgery followed by radiation with daily temozolomide, then further temozolomide, with median survival of roughly 15 months. MGMT promoter methylation predicts better response to temozolomide. The 2021 WHO classification reserves the name glioblastoma for IDH-wildtype tumors and dropped "multiforme." Senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain both died of glioblastoma.

2. Gradient boosting machine

Technology & Computing · Artificial Intelligence Abbreviations

An ensemble method that builds decision trees one after another, each correcting the errors of the previous ones, producing highly accurate models for tabular data. XGBoost, LightGBM and CatBoost are popular implementations.

Example: The GBM beat the neural network on our credit-risk data, as tree models often do on tables.

Formalized by Jerome Friedman around 1999 to 2001. XGBoost (2014) dominated Kaggle competitions on structured data for years, followed by Microsoft's LightGBM and Yandex's CatBoost in 2017. Tuning the learning rate and tree depth prevents overfitting. In medicine GBM means glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive brain cancer.

More hematology and oncology abbreviations

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  • FOLFOX – Folinic acid (leucovorin), fluorouracil, oxaliplatin
  • FVL – Factor V Leiden
  • G6PD – Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase
  • GVHD – Graft-versus-host disease
  • HbS – Hemoglobin S
  • HCT – Hematopoietic cell transplantation
  • HD – Hodgkin disease

See all 144 hematology and oncology abbreviations →

More artificial intelligence abbreviations

  • F1 – F1 score
  • FM – Foundation model
  • GA – Genetic algorithm
  • GAN – Generative adversarial network
  • GenAI – Generative artificial intelligence
  • GNN – Graph neural network
  • GPT – Generative pre-trained transformer
  • GRU – Gated recurrent unit

See all 103 artificial intelligence abbreviations →

This entry is for general education and is not medical advice. Abbreviation use varies between institutions; always confirm in context.