GAC: Gene Associations with Clinical, a web based application

Abstract

We present GAC, a shiny R based tool for interactive visualization of clinical associations based on high-dimensional data. The tool provides a web-based suite to perform supervised principal component analysis (SuperPC), an approach that uses both high-dimensional data, such as gene expression, combined with clinical data to infer clinical associations. We extended the approach to address binary outcomes, in addition to continuous and time-to-event data in our package, thereby increasing the use and flexibility of SuperPC.  Additionally, the tool provides an interactive visualization for summarizing results based on a forest plot for both binary and time-to-event data.  In summary, the GAC suite of tools provide a one stop shop for conducting statistical analysis to identify and visualize the association between a clinical outcome of interest and high-dimensional data types, such as genomic data. Our GAC package has been implemented in R and is available via http://shinygispa.winship.emory.edu/GAC/ . The developmental repository is available at https://github.com/manalirupji/GAC .