Method

Correction of technical bias in clinical microarray data improves concordance with known biological information

Aron C Eklund^1,2 and Zoltan Szallasi^1,2

¹Children's Hospital Informatics Program at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (CHIP@HST), Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA

²Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, Department of Systems Biology, Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark

author email corresponding author email

Genome Biology 2008, 9:R26doi:10.1186/gb-2008-9-2-r26

Published:	4 February 2008

Subject areas: Bioinformatics, Cancer, Genome studies

Abstract

The performance of gene expression microarrays has been well characterized using controlled reference samples, but the performance on clinical samples remains less clear. We identified sources of technical bias affecting many genes in concert, thus causing spurious correlations in clinical data sets and false associations between genes and clinical variables. We developed a method to correct for technical bias in clinical microarray data, which increased concordance with known biological relationships in multiple data sets.