A new criterion to select discriminatory gene pairs for Alzheimer's disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD), which is the most common dementia, has become a critical social and medical problem. High throughput microarray technology make it feasible to have a view at the molecular level. Identifying potential genes at the molecular level which are discriminatory in AD affected versus healthy controls will greatly help understand the pathogenesis of AD as well as the diagnosis and treatment of AD. In this article, we propose a new criterion to evaluate the importance of gene pairs by combining both latitudinal comparison and longitudinal comparison and then select discriminatory gene pairs for AD in four different brain regions: hippocampus (HC), entorhinal cortex (EC), superior frontal gyrus (SFG), and post-central gyrus (PCG). The experiment results show that the suggested criterion performs well in all four brain regions and the selected discriminatory gene pairs can help deep understand the pathogenesis of AD.