Preprocessing of clinical data
Overview
Introduction

The clinical information for each TCGA tumor sample is stored in a xml file. Patient ID, tumor and treatment info are entries of the xml file. These xml files have been preprocessed for further analysis.

Summary

Clinical data for tier 1 clinical variables are generated.

Table 1.  Tier1 clinical variables

Tumor.Feature Date.Statistics
gender dccuploaddate
primarysiteofdesease dateofbirth
histologicaltype dateofdeath
tumorstage dateoflastfollowup
tumorgrade dateoftumorrecurrence
patienttumorrecurrencestatus dateofinitialpathologicdiagnosis
radiationtherapy datelastknownalive
neoadjuvanttherapy vitalstatus
pathologicspread(pt)
pathologicspread(pn)
karnofskyperformancescore
Results
Tier 1 Data Statistics

Table 2.  Statistics of selected clinical variables.

Clinical.Variable Statistics
age mean: 67, std: 9
vitalstatus 112 deceased, 167 living
gender 204 male, 75 female
histologicaltype 269 lung squamous cell carcinoma- not otherwise specified (nos), 7 lung basaloid squamous cell carcinoma, 1 lung small cell squamous cell carcinoma, 1 lung papillary squamous cell caricnoma, 1 lung papillary squamous cell carcinoma
tumorstage 43 stage ia, 100 stage ib, 35 stage iiia, 4 stage iv, 49 stage iib, 24 stage iia, 18 stage iiib, 1 stage ii, 1 stage i
pathologicspread(pt) 39 t1, 132 t2, 26 t3, 17 t4, 31 t2a, 9 t2b, 19 t1b, 6 t1a
pathologicspread(pn) 177 n0, 23 n2, 74 n1, 5 n3
Tier 1 Data

Table 3.  Get Full Table Illustration of the tier 1 data for three patients

Clinical.Variable Sample_1 Sample_2 Sample_3
yearstobirth 67 72 77
daystodeath 371 227 NA
daystolastfollowup 370 136 2466
vitalstatus 1 1 0
dccuploaddate 27-4-2012 27-4-2012 27-4-2012
Methods & Data
Work Flow

1. Each xml file is converted to a tab-delimited text file by our R package.

2. All text files are aggregated into one big table by the Clinical_Aggregate_Tier1 pipeline. The 1st column of the table is the entry name of the xml file and the rest columns are the associated data for samples.

3. Data for the tier 1 clinical variables are extracted by the Clinical_Picker_Tier1 pipeline.

Diagram of Clinical Data Dicer

Figure 1.  Diagram that displays the work flow of processing clinical data. Clinical variables of interest and their associated values are marked in red and blue, respectively.