The BC Cancer Agency’s Personalized Oncogenomics Program (POG) is a clinical research initiative applying genomic sequencing to the diagnosis and treatment of patients with incurable cancers.

Art of the Personalized Oncogenomics Program

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.
— Richard Feynman

Art is Science in Love
— E.F. Weisslitz

what do the circles mean?

The legend can be printed at 4" × 6". The bitmap resolution is 600 dpi.

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▲ Quick legend. 5 Years of Personalized Oncogenomics Project at Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre. The poster shows 545 cancer cases. (zoom)

a case for a visual case summary

For every case, we sequence the DNA to study the genome structure and the RNA to discover which genes are expressed and to what extent. The analysis is quite complex and brings together many steps: sequence alignment, structural variation detection, expression profiling, pathway analysis and so on. Every case is "summarized" by a lengthy report, such as the one below, which can run to over 40 pages.

▲ A report for a typical POG case is about 40–50 pages.

One of the goals of the 5-year anniversary art was to represent the cases in a way to clearly show their number, classification as well as diversity. There are many metrics that can be used and I decided to choose the case's correlation to other cancer types.

correlation to TCGA cancer database

For every POG case, the gene expression of 1,744 key genes is compared to that of 1,000's of cases in the TCGA database of cancer samples. For a given cancer type in the TCGA database (e.g. BRCA), we visualize the correlations using box plots. The box plot is ideal for showing the distribution of values in a sample.

▲ Every case is compared to a database of 1,000's of cases. Shown here are box plots for the Spearman correlation coefficient between the gene expression of the POG case and cancers of a specific type (e.g. BRCA, LUAD, etc). (zoom)

The 10 largest Spearman correlation coefficients for the case shown above are

case    corr    type     tissue
-----------------------------------------------
POG661	0.436	BRCA	 Breast
POG661	0.371	PRAD	 Urologic
POG661	0.295	OV	 Gynecologic
POG661	0.257	UCEC	 Gynecologic
POG661	0.244	LUAD	 Thoracic
POG661	0.235	CESC_CAD Gynecologic
POG661	0.225	MB_Adult Central Nervous System
POG661	0.222	KICH	 Urologic
POG661	0.219	THCA	 Endocrine
POG661	0.208	UCS	 Gynecologic

In the figure below I show how the final encoding of the correlations is done. First, the top three correlations are taken—using more generates a busy look and diminishes visual impact. The correlations are encoded as concentric rings.

Because in most cases the differences in the top 3 correlations are relatively small, differences are emphasized by non-linearly scaling the encoding (the correlations are first scaled `r^3`).

▲ Case POG661. Median gene expression correlations with different cancer types from TCGA database. (A) Top 10 correlations shown as a bar plot. Color coding is by source tissue associated with the cancer type. (B) Top 10 correlations encoded as concentric rings. The width of the ring is proportional to the correlation. (C) Top 3 correlations. (D) Top 3 correlations scaled with a power to emphasize differences. (zoom)

The type face is Proxima Nova. The colors for each tissue source are

         Gastrointestinal ● 234,62,144
                   Breast ● 237,75,51
                 Thoracic ● 242,130,56
              Gynecologic ● 253,188,61
              Soft tissue ● 244,217,59
                     Skin ● 193,216,51
                 Urologic ● 114,197,49
              Hematologic ● 29,166,68
            Head and neck ● 43,168,224
                Endocrine ● 71,82,178
   Central nervous system ● 127,65,146
                    Other ● 150,150,150