Estimation of tumor heterogeneity using CGH array data

Background  

Array-based comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) is a commonly-used approach to detect DNA copy number variation in whole genome-wide screens. Several statistical methods have been proposed to define genomic segments with different copy numbers in cancer tumors. However, most tumors are heterogeneous and show variation in DNA copy numbers across tumor cells. The challenge is to reveal the copy number profiles of the subpopulations in a tumor and to estimate the percentage of each subpopulation.