Identification of differentially expressed spatial clusters using humoral response microarray data

The antibody microarray is a powerful chip-based technology for profiling hundreds of proteins simultaneously and is used increasingly nowadays. To study humoral response in pancreatic cancers, Patwa et al. (2007) developed a two-dimensional liquid separation technique and built a two-dimensional antibody microarray. However, identifying differential expression regions on the antibody microarray requires the use of appropriate statistical methods to fairly assess the large amounts of data generated. In this paper, we propose a permutation-based test using spatial information of the two-dimensional antibody microarray. By borrowing strength from the neighboring differentially expressed spots, we are able to detect the differential expression region with very high power controlling type I error at 0.05 in our simulation studies. We also apply the proposed methodology to a real microarray dataset.