Genetic or non-genetic prognostic factors for colon cancer classification

Abstract

Many researches have addressed patient classification using prognostic factors or gene expression profiles (GEPs). This study tried to identify whether a prognostic factor was genetic by using GEPs. If significant GEP difference was observed between two statuses of a factor, the factor might be genetic. If the GEP difference was largely less significant than the survival difference, the survival difference might not be due to the genes; then, the factor might be non-genetic or partly non-genetic. A practice was made in this study using public dataset GSE40967, which contains GEP data of 566 colon cancer patients, messages of tumour-node-metastasis (TNM) staging, etc. Prognostic factors T, N, M, and TNM were observed being non-genetic or partly non-genetic, which should be a complement for future gene expression classifiers.