The data were downloaded from the GEO database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/) and were selected based on the following criteria to ensure the reliability of the data analyses: (1) availability of raw microarray data; (2) inclusion of both oral squamous cell carcinoma and normal control (either adjacent normal or oral mucosa from healthy individuals); and (3) more than 10 tumor samples. Consequently, there were 6 datasets [11 (link),12 (link),13 (link),14 (link),15 ,16 (link)] using Affymetrix microarray that met our requirements (S1 Table). A total of 481 samples (326 OSCC and 165 normal controls) were included in this analysis. To ensure abundant availability of information for subsequent analyses, GSE9844/GSE30784/GSE31056 were labeled as “group I” (which was from Affymetrix Human Genome U133A Plus 2.0 array) and the remaining datasets were labeled as “group II” (which consisted of the former version of Affymetrix such as Human Genome U133A, Human Genome U95Av2 and Human Genome U133A2.0) according to their microarray platform.
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