Design of a multi-signature ensemble classifier predicting neuroblastoma patients' outcome

Andrea Cornero, Massimo Acquaviva, Paolo Fardin, Rogier Versteeg, Alexander Schramm, Alessandra Eva, Maria Carla Bosco, Fabiola Blengio, Sara Barzaghi, Luigi Varesio

Neuroblastoma is the most common pediatric solid tumor of the sympathetic nervous system. Development of improved predictive tools for patients stratification is a crucial requirement for neuroblastoma therapy. Several studies utilized gene expression-based signatures to stratify neuroblastoma patients and demonstrated a clear advantage of adding genomic analysis to risk assessment. There is little overlapping among signatures and merging their prognostic potential would be advantageous. Here, we describe a new strategy to merge published neuroblastoma related gene signatures into a single, highly accurate, Multi-Signature Ensemble (MuSE)-classifier of neuroblastoma (NB) patients outcome.