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

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. © 2008 Eklund and Szallasi; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.