Dataset Information

Rare disease knowledge enrichment through a data-driven approach.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Existing resources to assist the diagnosis of rare diseases are usually curated from the literature that can be limited for clinical use. It often takes substantial effort before the suspicion of a rare disease is even raised to utilize those resources. The primary goal of this study was to apply a data-driven approach to enrich existing rare disease resources by mining phenotype-disease associations from electronic medical record (EMR).

Methods

We first applied association rule mining algorithms on EMR to extract significant phenotype-disease associations and enriched existing rare disease resources (Human Phenotype Ontology and Orphanet (HPO-Orphanet)). We generated phenotype-disease bipartite graphs for HPO-Orphanet, EMR, and enriched knowledge base HPO-Orphanet?+?and conducted a case study on Hodgkin lymphoma to compare performance on differential diagnosis among these three graphs.

Results

We used disease-disease similarity generated by the eRAM, an existing rare disease encyclopedia, as a gold standard to compare the three graphs with sensitivity and specificity as (0.17, 0.36, 0.46) and (0.52, 0.47, 0.51) for three graphs respectively. We also compared the top 15 diseases generated by the HPO-Orphanet?+?graph with eRAM and another clinical diagnostic tool, the Phenomizer.

Conclusions

Per our evaluation results, our approach was able to enrich existing rare disease knowledge resources with phenotype-disease associations from EMR and thus support rare disease differential diagnosis.

SUBMITTER: Shen F

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6376651 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Rare disease knowledge enrichment through a data-driven approach.

Shen Feichen F Zhao Yiqing Y Wang Liwei L Mojarad Majid Rastegar MR Wang Yanshan Y Liu Sijia S Liu Hongfang H

BMC medical informatics and decision making 20190214 1

<h4>Background</h4>Existing resources to assist the diagnosis of rare diseases are usually curated from the literature that can be limited for clinical use. It often takes substantial effort before the suspicion of a rare disease is even raised to utilize those resources. The primary goal of this study was to apply a data-driven approach to enrich existing rare disease resources by mining phenotype-disease associations from electronic medical record (EMR).<h4>Methods</h4>We first applied associa ...[more]

PMID: 30764825

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Project description:BackgroundHigh-throughput (HT) technologies provide huge amount of gene expression data that can be used to identify biomarkers useful in the clinical practice. The most frequently used approaches first select a set of genes (i.e. gene signature) able to characterize differences between two or more phenotypical conditions, and then provide a functional assessment of the selected genes with an a posteriori enrichment analysis, based on biological knowledge. However, this approach comes with some drawbacks. First, gene selection procedure often requires tunable parameters that affect the outcome, typically producing many false hits. Second, a posteriori enrichment analysis is based on mapping between biological concepts and gene expression measurements, which is hard to compute because of constant changes in biological knowledge and genome analysis. Third, such mapping is typically used in the assessment of the coverage of gene signature by biological concepts, that is either score-based or requires tunable parameters as well, limiting its power.ResultsWe present Knowledge Driven Variable Selection (KDVS), a framework that uses a priori biological knowledge in HT data analysis. The expression data matrix is transformed, according to prior knowledge, into smaller matrices, easier to analyze and to interpret from both computational and biological viewpoints. Therefore KDVS, unlike most approaches, does not exclude a priori any function or process potentially relevant for the biological question under investigation. Differently from the standard approach where gene selection and functional assessment are applied independently, KDVS embeds these two steps into a unified statistical framework, decreasing the variability derived from the threshold-dependent selection, the mapping to the biological concepts, and the signature coverage. We present three case studies to assess the usefulness of the method.ConclusionsWe showed that KDVS not only enables the selection of known biological functionalities with accuracy, but also identification of new ones. An efficient implementation of KDVS was devised to obtain results in a fast and robust way. Computing time is drastically reduced by the effective use of distributed resources. Finally, integrated visualization techniques immediately increase the interpretability of results. Overall, KDVS approach can be considered as a viable alternative to enrichment-based approaches.

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Project description:BackgroundAlthough many efforts have been made to develop comprehensive disease resources that capture rare disease information for the purpose of clinical decision making and education, there is no standardized protocol for defining and harmonizing rare diseases across multiple resources. This introduces data redundancy and inconsistency that may ultimately increase confusion and difficulty for the wide use of these resources. To overcome such encumbrances, we report our preliminary study to identify phenotypical similarity among genetic and rare diseases (GARD) that are presenting similar clinical manifestations, and support further data harmonization.ObjectiveTo support rare disease data harmonization, we aim to systematically identify phenotypically similar GARD diseases from a disease-oriented integrative knowledge graph and determine their similarity types.MethodsWe identified phenotypically similar GARD diseases programmatically with 2 methods: (1) We measured disease similarity by comparing disease mappings between GARD and other rare disease resources, incorporating manual assessment; 2) we derived clinical manifestations presenting among sibling diseases from disease classifications and prioritized the identified similar diseases based on their phenotypes and genotypes.ResultsFor disease similarity comparison, approximately 87% (341/392) identified, phenotypically similar disease pairs were validated; 80% (271/392) of these disease pairs were accurately identified as phenotypically similar based on similarity score. The evaluation result shows a high precision (94%) and a satisfactory quality (86% F measure). By deriving phenotypical similarity from Monarch Disease Ontology (MONDO) and Orphanet disease classification trees, we identified a total of 360 disease pairs with at least 1 shared clinical phenotype and gene, which were applied for prioritizing clinical relevance. A total of 662 phenotypically similar disease pairs were identified and will be applied for GARD data harmonization.ConclusionsWe successfully identified phenotypically similar rare diseases among the GARD diseases via 2 approaches, disease mapping comparison and phenotypical similarity derivation from disease classification systems. The results will not only direct GARD data harmonization in expanding translational science research but will also accelerate data transparency and consistency across different disease resources and terminologies, helping to build a robust and up-to-date knowledge resource on rare diseases.

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Dataset Information

Rare disease knowledge enrichment through a data-driven approach.

Background

Methods

Results

Conclusions

Publications

Rare disease knowledge enrichment through a data-driven approach.

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