B0324
Title: Nonparametric Bayesian functional clustering for breast cancer disparities
Authors: Wenyu Gao - University of North Carolina at Charlotte (United States) [presenting]
Wonil Nam - Virginia Tech (United States)
Inyoung Kim - Virginia Tech (United States)
Wei Zhou - Virginia Tech (United States)
Abstract: It has been found that different incidence and mortality rates for breast cancer exist among various racial populations. For instance, Caucasian women are more likely to develop breast cancer than African American women. To study these disparities, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has been conducted to provide biomolecular fingerprint information. Extracellular SERS signals from each cell type were measured by a practical high-performance SERS device. However, large intraclass variations exist due to cellular and additional cancerous heterogeneity. To study the differences between two types of triple negative breast cancer cell lines at the molecular level, we performed clustering analyses on the massive nonlinear curves of signals versus Raman shifts. We propose a nonparametric Bayesian functional clustering method via Weighted Dirichlet Process Mixture (WDPM) modeling, which clusters automatically and determines correct number of clusters. Based on our analyses, we identify that the clustering behaviors vary across different racial groups. This clustering information will be useful to further investigate health disparities among groups.
