Microarrays, scan dates and Bioconductor: it shouldn’t be this difficult

When dealing with data from high-throughput experimental platforms such as microarrays, it’s important to account for potential batch effects. A simple example: if you process all your normal tissue samples this week and your cancerous tissue samples next week, you’re in big trouble. Differences between cancer and normal are now confounded with processing time and you may as well start over with new microarrays.

Processing date is often a good surrogate for batch and it was once easy to extract dates from Affymetrix CEL files using Bioconductor. It seems that this is no longer the case.