A Survey on Microarray Gene Expression Cancer Diagnosis

A cancer diagnosis by using the DNA microarray data faces many challenges the most serious one being the presence of thousands of genes and only several dozens of patient's samples. The classification of different tumor types is of great importance in cancer diagnosis and drug discovery. Although cancer classification has improved over the past 30 years, there has been no general approach for identifying new cancer classes (class discovery)or for assigning tumors to known classes (class prediction). The recent advent of DNA microarray technique has made simultaneous monitoring of thousands of gene expressions possible. The results demonstrate the feasibility of cancer classification based solely on gene expression monitoring and suggest a general strategy for discovering and predicting cancer classes for other types of cancer, independent of previous biological knowledge.