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Updated: Mar 17, 2026

A Model for Perineural Invasion in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma
Published on: January 5, 2017
Gene Variability Between Perineural-positive and Perineural-negative Squamous Cell Skin Cancers
Ashley C Mays1, Jeff Chou2, Ann L Craddock3
1Department of Otolaryngology, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston Salem, NC, U.S.A. ashleycmays@gmail.com.
Aim:
To identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between perineural invasion-positive (PP) and -negative (PN) cutaneous squamous cell cancers (CSCC).
Materials/Methods:
Forty CSCC samples with and without perineural invasion were processed for RNA isolation and hybridization to Affymetrix-U219 DNA microarrays. Raw gene expression data were normalized by Robust Multi-array Averaging (RMA) and log2 transformed. Gene expression-based classification models were created and accuracies evaluated using leave-one-out cross-validation.
Results:
At a stringent limma p-value (p<0.001), 24 genes were differentially expressed between PP and PN samples. The cross-validated performance of the eight classification models exhibited a mean accuracy of 85-95%. Diagonal linear discriminant was most accurate at 95%, followed by Bayesian compound covariate at 94%. The poorest accuracy (85%) was observed for 1-Nearest neighbor and Support vector machines.
Conclusion:
Gene expression may distinguish between PP and PN CSCC. Understanding these gene patterns may potentiate more timely diagnosis of perineural invasion and guide comprehensive therapies.

