An encapsulated R application for the guided analysis of genomic data

Microarrays are widely used in biomedical research. However, researchers conducting the biomedical assays are often not skilled to perform the necessary biostatistical preprocessing of the resulting data. As a result, researchers with different backgrounds contribute to the analysis, but often without documenting how the data were transformed. For a biomedical research network on liver cancer, we implemented a prototype that has two major aims: First, it should guide biomedical researchers through the analysis of microarray data by providing a limited amount of appropriate choices for the biostatistical procedures to be applied. Second, it should help to ensure data quality by documenting all transformations applied to the data set.