Output details

PICNIC: An algorithm to predict absolute allelic copy number variation with microarray cancer data

<28> We describe a Bayesian hidden Markov model technique used to extract copy number segmentation for cancer genomes from microarray data. Previous methods generally reported the relative change in copy number signal. This was the first method with sufficient precision to report the actual integer number of copies of segments of the genome for each parental allele. This method also allows single nucleotide polymorphisms to be classified as heterozygous or homozygous. Such a precise description of the genome has found application in several areas of cancer research. The algorithm is also freely available to download for the cancer research community.