StratomeX - Integrative Visualization of Tumor Subtypes in Cancer Genomics Data Sets

Abstract

The core concept of our approach is to visualize patient stratifications (partitions of the set of all patients for a given cancer) and the relationships between these groupings in a given tumor type. Groupings of patients are obtained for instance by clustering mRNA, microRNA or DNA methylation profiles. Groups can also be derived from copy number levels of a particular gene or gene mutation status, e.g., one group for "wild-type", one for "mutated". In the visualization, stratifications are represented as columns and the groups are represented as blocks in these columns. Relationships between groups are visualized as ribbons of varying width drawn between neighboring columns. Wide ribbons encode a high co-occurrence of samples in the connected groups, while the absence of ribbons between blocks indicates mutual exclusion. This encoding provides a straightforward and scalable overview of the consistency of group memberships of samples across different data types. StratomeX is implemented in the Caleydo Visualization Framework.