References of "BMC Medical Genomics"
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See detailComparative transcriptome analysis of Parkinson’s disease and Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome reveals shared susceptible cellular network processes
Hendrickx, Diana M.; Glaab, Enrico UL

in BMC Medical Genomics (2020), 13(114),

Background Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome (HGPS) are two heterogeneous disorders, which both display molecular and clinical alterations associated with the aging process ... [more ▼]

Background Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome (HGPS) are two heterogeneous disorders, which both display molecular and clinical alterations associated with the aging process. However, similarities and differences between molecular changes in these two disorders have not yet been investigated systematically at the level of individual biomolecules and shared molecular network alterations. Methods Here, we perform a comparative meta-analysis and network analysis of human transcriptomics data from case-control studies for both diseases to investigate common susceptibility genes and sub-networks in PD and HGPS. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and primary melanoma (PM) were included as controls to confirm that the identified overlapping susceptibility genes for PD and HGPS are non-generic. Results We find statistically significant, overlapping genes and cellular processes with significant alterations in both diseases. Interestingly, the majority of these shared affected genes display changes with opposite directionality, indicating that shared susceptible cellular processes undergo different mechanistic changes in PD and HGPS. A complementary regulatory network analysis also reveals that the altered genes in PD and HGPS both contain targets controlled by the upstream regulator CDC5L. Conclusions Overall, our analyses reveal a significant overlap of affected cellular processes and molecular sub-networks in PD and HGPS, including changes in aging-related processes that may reflect key susceptibility factors associated with age-related risk for PD. [less ▲]

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See detailA deep neural network approach to predicting clinical outcomes of neuroblastoma patients
Tranchevent, Leon-Charles UL; Azuaje, Francisco; Rajapakse, Jagath

in BMC Medical Genomics (2019), 12(8), 178

Background The availability of high-throughput omics datasets from large patient cohorts has allowed the development of methods that aim at predicting patient clinical outcomes, such as survival and ... [more ▼]

Background The availability of high-throughput omics datasets from large patient cohorts has allowed the development of methods that aim at predicting patient clinical outcomes, such as survival and disease recurrence. Such methods are also important to better understand the biological mechanisms underlying disease etiology and development, as well as treatment responses. Recently, different predictive models, relying on distinct algorithms (including Support Vector Machines and Random Forests) have been investigated. In this context, deep learning strategies are of special interest due to their demonstrated superior performance over a wide range of problems and datasets. One of the main challenges of such strategies is the “small n large p” problem. Indeed, omics datasets typically consist of small numbers of samples and large numbers of features relative to typical deep learning datasets. Neural networks usually tackle this problem through feature selection or by including additional constraints during the learning process. Methods We propose to tackle this problem with a novel strategy that relies on a graph-based method for feature extraction, coupled with a deep neural network for clinical outcome prediction. The omics data are first represented as graphs whose nodes represent patients, and edges represent correlations between the patients’ omics profiles. Topological features, such as centralities, are then extracted from these graphs for every node. Lastly, these features are used as input to train and test various classifiers. Results We apply this strategy to four neuroblastoma datasets and observe that models based on neural networks are more accurate than state of the art models (DNN: 85%-87%, SVM/RF: 75%-82%). We explore how different parameters and configurations are selected in order to overcome the effects of the small data problem as well as the curse of dimensionality. Conclusions Our results indicate that the deep neural networks capture complex features in the data that help predicting patient clinical outcomes. [less ▲]

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See detailDeconvolution of Transcriptomes and miRNomes by Independent Component Analysis Provides Insights Into Biological Processes and Clinical Outcomes of Melanoma Patients
Nazarov, Petr V.; Wienecke-Baldacchino, Anke K.; Zinovyev, Andrei et al

in BMC Medical Genomics (2019), 12 (1)(132),

Background: The amount of publicly available cancer-related“omics”data is constantly growing and can potentially be used to gain insights into the tumour biology of new cancer patients, their diagnosis ... [more ▼]

Background: The amount of publicly available cancer-related“omics”data is constantly growing and can potentially be used to gain insights into the tumour biology of new cancer patients, their diagnosis and suitable treatment options. However, the integration of different datasets is not straightforward and requires specialized approaches to deal with heterogeneity at technical and biological levels. Methods: Here we present a method that can overcome technical biases, predict clinically relevant outcomes and identify tumour-related biological processes in patients using previously collected large discovery datasets. The approach is based on independent component analysis (ICA)–an unsupervised method of signal deconvolution. We developed parallel consensus ICA that robustly decomposes transcriptomics datasets into expression profiles with minimal mutual dependency. Results: By applying the method to a small cohort of primary melanoma and control samples combined with a large discovery melanoma dataset, we demonstrate that our method distinguishes cell-type specific signals from technical biases and allows to predict clinically relevant patient characteristics. We showed the potential of the method to predict cancer subtypes and estimate the activity of key tumour-related processes such as immune response, angiogenesis and cell proliferation. ICA-based risk score was proposed and its connection to patient survival was validated with an independent cohort of patients. Additionally, through integration of components identified for mRNA and miRNA data, the proposed method helped deducing biological functions of miRNAs, which would otherwise not be possible. Conclusions: We present a method that can be used to map new transcriptomic data from cancer patient samples onto large discovery datasets. The method corrects technical biases, helps characterizing activity of biological processes or cell types in the new samples and provides the prognosis of patient survival [less ▲]

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