Pritha Mahata (Pritha.Mahata@newcastle.edu.au)
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of
Newcastle,
University Drive Callaghan, Newcastle, NSW 2308, Australia
Epithelial carcinoma of the ovary is one of the most common gynecological malignancies and the fifth most frequent cause of cancer death in women. Currently blood test of advanced epithelial tumors are
reflected in a high level of CA 125 antigen. However, it is not a good marker for
early stage tumors, and may yield false positives.
Clearly, there is a need for better understanding of
the molecular pathogenesis of epithelial ovarian cancer, so that new drug targets
or biomarkers that facilitate early detection can be identified. This work concentrates on finding
genetic markers for three epithelial ovarian tumors, using a simple computational method.
We give a small set of genetic markers which are able to distinguish
clear cell and mucinous ovarian cancers (13 and 26 genes respectively) from other epithelial
ovarian tumors with 100% accuracy. We obtain the genes HNF1-beta (TCF2) and GGT1 as the best markers for the clear cell and CEACAM6 (NCA) as the best marker for mucinous ovarian tumors.
We employ a feature selection technique based on minimum probability of error for this purpose.
We give a ranking of the important genes responsible for these tumors and validate the results
using the leave-one-out cross-validation technique.
Using this method, we also agree with the common notion that WT1 is one of the best genes to separate
serous ovarian tumors from other epithelial ovarian tumors.