Annotating breast cancer microarray samples using ontologies.

As the most common cancer among women, breast cancer results from the accumulation of mutations in essential genes. Recent advance in high-throughput gene expression microarray technology has inspired researchers to use the technology to assist breast cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment prediction. However, the high dimensionality of microarray experiments and public access of data from many experiments have caused inconsistencies which initiated the development of controlled terminologies and ontologies for annotating microarray experiments, such as the standard microarray Gene Expression Data (MGED) ontology(MO).