Microarray-MD: A system for exploratory analysis of microarray gene expression data

In this paper we present Microarray-MD (Microarray Medical Diagnosis), a novel microarray data analysis software system which utilizes gene expression data for medical diagnosis. It implements a combination scheme of multiple Support Vector Machines, which integrates a variety of gene selection criteria and allows for the discrimination of multiple diseases or subtypes of a disease. The system can be trained and automatically tune its parameters with the provision of pathologically characterized gene expression data to its input. A graphical user interface provides easy access to the system operations and direct adjustment of its parameters. It has been tested on various publicly available datasets. The overall accuracy it achieves was estimated to exceed 90%. The Microarray-MD system can be used as a diagnostic aid to physicians and with the decreasing cost of microarrays it could potentially prove to be an asset in everyday medical practice.