The node-weighted Steiner tree approach to identify elements of cancer-related signaling pathways

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Cancer constitutes a momentous health burden in our society. Critical information on cancer may be hidden in its signaling pathways. However, even though a large amount of money has been spent on cancer research, some critical information on cancer-related signaling pathways still remains elusive. Hence, new works towards a complete understanding of cancer-related signaling pathways will greatly benefit the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer. RESULTS: We propose the node-weighted Steiner tree approach to identify important elements of cancer-related signaling pathways at the level of proteins. This new approach has advantages over previous approaches since it is fast ..