This article is part of the supplement: Articles selected from posters presented at the Tenth Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Biology .

Research

On consensus biomarker selection

Janusz Dutkowski and Anna Gambin

Institute of Informatics, Warsaw University. Banacha 2 02-097 Warsaw, Poland

author email corresponding author email

BMC Bioinformatics 2007, 8(Suppl 5):S5doi:10.1186/1471-2105-8-S5-S5

Published:	24 May 2007

Abstract

Background

Recent development of mass spectrometry technology enabled the analysis of complex peptide mixtures. A lot of effort is currently devoted to the identification of biomarkers in human body fluids like serum or plasma, based on which new diagnostic tests for different diseases could be constructed. Various biomarker selection procedures have been exploited in recent studies. It has been noted that they often lead to different biomarker lists and as a consequence, the patient classification may also vary.

Results

Here we propose a new approach to the biomarker selection problem: to apply several competing feature ranking procedures and compute a consensus list of features based on their outcomes. We validate our methods on two proteomic datasets for the diagnosis of ovarian and prostate cancer.

Conclusion

The proposed methodology can improve the classification results and at the same time provide a unified biomarker list for further biological examinations and interpretation.