[Use of DNA chips (microarrays) in medicine: technical foundations and basic procedures for statistical analysis of...

DNA microarray technology allows the assessment of genetic analyses on thousands of genes simultaneously. The statistical analyses of these experiments are challenging since a high number of multiple hypotheses are tested and classical statistical methods need to adapt to this situation. Furthermore, the great variability observed in the experiments and their high cost of them needs a careful design. In this review we will explain what is a cDNA microarray, how it works and its potential uses. Later we will deal with statistical issues of design and analysis, from the image processing and data quality control, to the statistical test of hypothesis to detect interesting genes. Finally we will comment on multivariate methods to detect patterns in gene expression.