Molecular diagnosis of human cancer type by gene expression profiles and independent component analysis

The precise diagnosis of cancer type based on microarray data is of particular importance and is also a challenging task. We have devised a novel pattern recognition procedure based on independent component analysis (ICA). Different from the conventional cancer classification methods, which are limited in their clinical applicability of cancer diagnosis, our method extracts explicitly, by ICA algorithm, a set of specific diagnostic patterns of normal and tumor tissues corresponding to a set of biomarkers for clinical use. We validated our procedure with the colon and prostate cancer data sets and achieved good diagnosis (>90%) on the data sets studied here. This technique is also suitable for the identification of diagnostic expression patterns for other human cancers and demonstrates the feasibility of simple and accurate molecular cancer diagnostics for clinical implementation. © 2005 Nature Publishing Group All rights reserved.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

A novel method for automated classification of epileptiform activity in the human electroencephalogram-based on independent component analysis.

Diagnosis of several neurological disorders is based on the detection of typical pathological patterns in the electroencephalogram (EEG). This is a time-consuming task requiring significant training and experience. Automatic detection of these EEG patterns would greatly assist in quantitative analysis and interpretation. We present a method, which allows automatic detection of epileptiform events and discrimination of them from eye blinks, and is based on features derived using a novel application of independent component analysis. The algorithm was trained and cross validated using seven EEGs with epileptiform activity. For epileptiform events with compensation for eyeblinks, the sensitivity was 65 +/- 22% at a specificity of 86 +/- 7% (mean +/- SD). With feature extraction by PCA or classification of raw data, specificity reduced to 76 and 74%, respectively, for the same sensitivity. On exactly the same data, the commercially available software Reveal had a maximum sensitivity of 30% and concurrent specificity of 77%. Our algorithm performed well at detecting epileptiform events in this preliminary test and offers a flexible tool that is intended to be generalized to the simultaneous classification of many waveforms in the EEG