Appendix: Content Summaries of Selected Best Papers for the 2019 IMIA Yearbook, Section
Bioinformatics and Translational Informatics
Lee SI, Celik S, Logsdon BA, Lundberg SM, Martins TJ, Oehler VG, Estey EH, Miller
CP Chien S, Dai J, Saxena A, Blau CA, Becker PS
A machine learning approach to integrate big data for precision medicine in acute
myeloid leukemia
Nat Commun 2018 Jan;9(l):42
The authors present in this paper a statistical method to identify molecular markers
for targeted treatment of acute myeloid leukemia using omics data (genome-wide gene
expression profiles) and in vitro sensitivity to 160 chemotherapy drugs. They describe
the MERGE algorithm (standing for mutation, expression hubs, known regulators, genomic
copy number variation, and methylation) a computational method to identify gene expression
markers using multi-omics data. In a nutshell, MERGE learns from data the contribution
of five key features (e.g, mutation associated to acute myeloid leukemia, hubness in a gene expression network)
to the drive of gene potentially implicated in cancer progression. A complete approach
is designed ranging from data collection and method development to both in silico and in vivo validation.
Mobadersany P, Yousefi S, Amgad M, Gutman DA, Barnholtz-Sloan JS, Velazquez Vega JE,
Brat DJ, Cooper LAD
Predicting cancer outcomes from histology and genomics using convolutional networks
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2018;115(13):E2970-E2979
This paper presents a method to predict the survival of patients based on digital
pathology images as well as genomics biomarkers. The authors developed a neural network
based approach to predict the survival of patient on the basis of digitalized pathology
images and genomics biomarkers. The authors describe a Survival Convolutional Neural
Network (SCNN) designed to predict the survival of patients suffering from glioma.
The networks are trained using public data coming from the TCGA datasets. To help
in the interpretation and understanding of the prediction, the authors use a heat
map visualization highlighting the structures identified as important by the neural
networks.
Sengupta S, Sun SQ, Huang KL, Oh C, Bailey MH, Varghese R, Wyczalkowski MA, Ning J,
Tripathi P, Mc Michael JF, Johnson KJ, Kandoth C, Welch J, Ma C, Wendl MC, Payne SH,
Fenyo D, Townsend RR, Dipersio JF, Chen F, Ding L
Integrative omics analyses broaden treatment targets in human cancer
Genome Med 2018 Jul 27;10(1):60
In this work the authors adopt a pan-cancer approach to take benefit of multi-omics
data for drug repurposing. Their goal is to identify drugs approved by the Food and
Drug Administration for cancer location not yet mentioned in the approval. The authors
rely on the Database of Evidence for Precision Oncology (DEPO), a tool they built,
to link druggability to genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic biomarkers. They used
a pan-cancer cohort of more than 6,500 tumors to identify tumor with potential druggable
markers. The authors rely on the DEPO database (integrating genomic, transcriptomic,
proteomic data, and clinical data over several types of cancer samples) and structural
alignment tools for identifying tumors with potentially druggable biomarkers consisting
of drug-associated mutations, micro-RNA expression outliers, and protein/ phosphoprotein
expression outliers. Orthogonal validation of putative biomarkers was performed thanks
to the large-scale drug screening dataset GDSC (Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer).
Torshizi AD, Petzold LR
Graph-based semi-supervised learning with genomic data integration using condition-responsive
genes applied to phenotype classification
J Am Med Inform Assoc 2018;25(1):99-108
This paper presents a graph-based semi-supervised method to phenotype classification
of samples. Several graphs of labeled and unlabeled samples are built on features
sets corresponding to distinct genomic levels (gene expression, DNA methylation, micro-RNA).
Additional graphs add pathway knowledge -for each considered genomic level- through
the use of condition-responsive genes (CORGs). CORGs are, for each pathway, the most
discriminative set of genes containing the highest statistical signal level. The authors
define three feature sets corresponding to different subsets of CORGs (the whole sets,
the top P-value ranked genes, the top ranked genes according to their frequency in
all CORGs). A weighted integration of the various graphs is performed before the semi-supervised
learning based on the K nearest neighbors principles. The method was applied on ovarian
cancer data from the Human genome Atlas. The conducted experiments assessed the added
value of the method compared to the existing ones. The results also show that the
classification accuracy is effectively improved when integrating transcriptomic, epigenetic,
and pathway knowledge.
