<p>This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</p> <p>The massive surge in the production of microarray data poses a great challenge
for proper analysis and interpretation. In recent years numerous computational
tools have been developed to extract meaningful interpretation of microarray gene
expression data. However, a convenient tool for two-groups comparison of microarray
data is still lacking and users have to rely on commercial statistical packages that
might be costly and require special skills, in addition to extra time and effort for
transferring data from one platform to other. Various statistical methods, including
the <italic>t</italic>-test, analysis of variance, Pearson test and Mann–Whitney U test, have been
reported for comparing microarray data, whereas the utilization of the Wilcoxon
signed-rank test, which is an appropriate test for two-groups comparison of gene
expression data, has largely been neglected in microarray studies. The aim of this
investigation was to build an integrated tool, ArraySolver, for colour-coded graphical
display and comparison of gene expression data using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test.
The results of software validation showed similar outputs with ArraySolver and SPSS
for large datasets. Whereas the former program appeared to be more accurate for
25 or fewer pairs (<italic>n</italic> ≤ 25), suggesting its potential application in analysing molecular
signatures that usually contain small numbers of genes. The main advantages of
ArraySolver are easy data selection, convenient report format, accurate statistics and
the familiar Excel platform.</p>
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Comp Funct Genomics. 2004 Feb; 5(1):39-47