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Tumors of central nervous system (CNS) represent a unique challenge in diagnosis
and treatment because of their heterogeneous phenotypic and genotypic behavior.
Unambiguous characterization of these tumors is essential towards accurate prognosis
and therapy. Rapid advancements in microarray technologies have made it very promising
to achieve this unambiguous characterization. In this work, we propose a procedure
for classifying Central Nervous System (CNS) tumors based on DNA microarray gene
expressions of samples from patients with a variety of CNS tumor types. After obtaining
the tumor specific gene expression estimates, significantly differentially expressed
(marker) genes are located. Then, the genes are clustered using a complete linkage
hierarchical algorithm. The algorithm involves clustering together all the genes
that show high correlation in their expression measures across the samples. From
such gene-cluster, eigengene expressions are obtained by projecting the expression
values of the genes within the same cluster onto their first three principal components.
In the final step of building prototype for any particular tumor type, the corresponding
tissue samples with eigengene expressions are divided into subgroups using self-organizing
map (SOM). The set of centroids of the subgroups is used as the prototype of the
corresponding tumor type. In predicting the tumor type of a new tissue sample, distances
are calculated between the new sample and all the centroids of all the tumor prototypes.
The new tissue sample is classified to the tumor type of the nearest centroid. Experimental
results reported in this work strongly support the histological categorization of
the tumors and the current knowledge of their molecular definitions.
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