Heterogeneous data analysis of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy to prioritize important genes

Abstract

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a cardiovascular disease that is often caused by abnormal genes in the heart muscle. The identification of HCM-related genes is one of the crucial tasks to prevent and treat the patient. Gene expression analysis is a direct approach to screen for a gene with a higher or lower expression level in the HCM cell than in the normal cell. Microarray and RNA-Seq technology are used for measuring transcription levels. Both techniques have different advantages to obtain gene expression data. The integration of microarray and RNA-Seq data has already been effectively used to identify disease biomarkers. The ranking method is an interesting technique and is mostly used for ranking players or teams in sports. Each method has different strengths and can be appropriately applied to integrate various data and used to prioritize the importance genes. In this work, six ranking techniques to integrate microarray and RNA-Seq data were applied to prioritize the HCM-related genes. The performance reveals that the ranking method is also a well-suited technique in this task, and it turns out that the PageRank technique yields the best performance.