Diagnostic signatures from microarrays: a bioinformatics concept for personalized medicine.

Microarrays can be used as diagnostic clinical tools, providing a global overview of gene transcription in diseased tissues. Expression profiles can be easily obtained in a single assay and provide exhaustive information about molecular events that are often directly linked to the cause of a disease. However, the high complexity of the data are challenging. This article reviews recent efforts in bioinformatics and statistics to overcome this problem and make feasible the clinical analysis of gene expression profiles.