Microarray techniques are used to generate a large amount of information on gene expression. This information can be statistically processed and analyzed to identify the genes useful for the diagnosis and prognosis of genetic diseases. Game theoretic tools are applied to analyze the gene expression data. Gene co-expression networks are increasingly used to explore the system-level functionality of genes, where the roles of the genes in building networks in addition to their independent activities are also considered. In this paper, we develop a novel microarray network game by constructing a gene co-expression network and defining a game on this network. The notion of the Link Relevance Index (LRI) for this network game is introduced and characterized. The LRI successfully identifies the relevant cancer biomarkers. It also enables identifying salient genes in the colon cancer dataset. Network games can more accurately describe the interactions among genes as their basic premises are to consider the interactions among players prescribed by a network structure. LRI presents a tool to identify the underlying salient genes involved in cancer or other metabolic syndromes.

Diapeutics gene markers in colorectal cancer (CRC) can help manage mortality caused by the disease. We applied a game-theoretic link relevance Index (LRI) scoring on the high-throughput whole-genome transcriptome dataset to identify salient genes in CRC and obtained 126 salient genes with LRI score greater than zero. The biomarkers database lacks preliminary information on the salient genes as biomarkers for all the available cancer cell types. The salient genes revealed eleven, one and six overrepresentations for major Biological Processes, Molecular Function, and Cellular components. However, no enrichment with respect to chromosome location was found for the salient genes. Significantly high enrichments were observed for several KEGG, Reactome and PPI terms. The survival analysis of top protein-coding salient genes exhibited superior prognostic characteristics for CRC. MIR143HG, AMOTL1, ACTG2 and other salient genes lack sufficient information regarding their etiological role in CRC. Further investigation in LRI methodology and salient genes to augment the existing knowledge base may create new milestones in CRC diapeutics.