Abstract

We investigated whether prognostic information is reflected in the expression patterns of ovarian carcinoma samples. RNA obtained from seven FIGO stage I without recurrence, seven platin-sensitive advanced-stage (III or IV), and six platin-resistant advanced-stage ovarian tumors was hybridized on a complementary DNA microarray with 21,372 spotted clones. The results revealed that a considerable number of genes exhibit nonaccidental differential expression between the different tumor classes. Principal component analysis reflected the differences between the three tumor classes and their order of transition. Using a leave-one-out approach together with least squares support vector machines, we obtained an estimated classification test accuracy of 100% for the distinction between stage I and advanced-stage disease and 76.92% for the distinction between platin-resistant versus platin-sensitive disease in FIGO stage III/IV. These results indicate that gene expression patterns could be useful in clinical management of ovarian cancer.