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Journal Of Biomedical Semantics[JOURNAL]

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Using OWL reasoning to support the generation of novel gene sets for enrichment analysis.

Osumi-Sutherland DJ, Ponta E, Courtot M … +2 more , Parkinson H, Badi L

J Biomed Semantics · 2018 Feb · PMID 29444698 · Full text

BACKGROUND: The Gene Ontology (GO) consists of over 40,000 terms for biological processes, cell components and gene product activities linked into a graph structure by over 90,000 relationships. It has been used to annot... BACKGROUND: The Gene Ontology (GO) consists of over 40,000 terms for biological processes, cell components and gene product activities linked into a graph structure by over 90,000 relationships. It has been used to annotate the functions and cellular locations of several million gene products. The graph structure is used by a variety of tools to group annotated genes into sets whose products share function or location. These gene sets are widely used to interpret the results of genomics experiments by assessing which sets are significantly over- or under-represented in results lists. F Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. has developed a bespoke, manually maintained controlled vocabulary (RCV) for use in over-representation analysis. Many terms in this vocabulary group GO terms in novel ways that cannot easily be derived using the graph structure of the GO. For example, some RCV terms group GO terms by the cell, chemical or tissue type they refer to. Recent improvements in the content and formal structure of the GO make it possible to use logical queries in Web Ontology Language (OWL) to automatically map these cross-cutting classifications to sets of GO terms. We used this approach to automate mapping between RCV and GO, largely replacing the increasingly unsustainable manual mapping process. We then tested the utility of the resulting groupings for over-representation analysis. RESULTS: We successfully mapped 85% of RCV terms to logical OWL definitions and showed that these could be used to recapitulate and extend manual mappings between RCV terms and the sets of GO terms subsumed by them. We also show that gene sets derived from the resulting GO terms sets can be used to detect the signatures of cell and tissue types in whole genome expression data. CONCLUSIONS: The rich formal structure of the GO makes it possible to use reasoning to dynamically generate novel, biologically relevant groupings of GO terms. GO term groupings generated with this approach can be used in. over-representation analysis to detect cell and tissue type signatures in whole genome expression data.

Supporting shared hypothesis testing in the biomedical domain.

Agibetov A, Jiménez-Ruiz E, Ondrésik M … +8 more , Solimando A, Banerjee I, Guerrini G, Catalano CE, Oliveira JM, Patanè G, Reis RL, Spagnuolo M

J Biomed Semantics · 2018 Feb · PMID 29422110 · Full text

BACKGROUND: Pathogenesis of inflammatory diseases can be tracked by studying the causality relationships among the factors contributing to its development. We could, for instance, hypothesize on the connections of the pa... BACKGROUND: Pathogenesis of inflammatory diseases can be tracked by studying the causality relationships among the factors contributing to its development. We could, for instance, hypothesize on the connections of the pathogenesis outcomes to the observed conditions. And to prove such causal hypotheses we would need to have the full understanding of the causal relationships, and we would have to provide all the necessary evidences to support our claims. In practice, however, we might not possess all the background knowledge on the causality relationships, and we might be unable to collect all the evidence to prove our hypotheses. RESULTS: In this work we propose a methodology for the translation of biological knowledge on causality relationships of biological processes and their effects on conditions to a computational framework for hypothesis testing. The methodology consists of two main points: hypothesis graph construction from the formalization of the background knowledge on causality relationships, and confidence measurement in a causality hypothesis as a normalized weighted path computation in the hypothesis graph. In this framework, we can simulate collection of evidences and assess confidence in a causality hypothesis by measuring it proportionally to the amount of available knowledge and collected evidences. CONCLUSIONS: We evaluate our methodology on a hypothesis graph that represents both contributing factors which may cause cartilage degradation and the factors which might be caused by the cartilage degradation during osteoarthritis. Hypothesis graph construction has proven to be robust to the addition of potentially contradictory information on the simultaneously positive and negative effects. The obtained confidence measures for the specific causality hypotheses have been validated by our domain experts, and, correspond closely to their subjective assessments of confidences in investigated hypotheses. Overall, our methodology for a shared hypothesis testing framework exhibits important properties that researchers will find useful in literature review for their experimental studies, planning and prioritizing evidence collection acquisition procedures, and testing their hypotheses with different depths of knowledge on causal dependencies of biological processes and their effects on the observed conditions.

DMTO: a realistic ontology for standard diabetes mellitus treatment.

El-Sappagh S, Kwak D, Ali F … +1 more , Kwak KS

J Biomed Semantics · 2018 Feb · PMID 29409535 · Full text

BACKGROUND: Treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a complex problem. A clinical decision support system (CDSS) based on massive and distributed electronic health record data can facilitate the automation of thi... BACKGROUND: Treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a complex problem. A clinical decision support system (CDSS) based on massive and distributed electronic health record data can facilitate the automation of this process and enhance its accuracy. The most important component of any CDSS is its knowledge base. This knowledge base can be formulated using ontologies. The formal description logic of ontology supports the inference of hidden knowledge. Building a complete, coherent, consistent, interoperable, and sharable ontology is a challenge. RESULTS: This paper introduces the first version of the newly constructed Diabetes Mellitus Treatment Ontology (DMTO) as a basis for shared-semantics, domain-specific, standard, machine-readable, and interoperable knowledge relevant to T2DM treatment. It is a comprehensive ontology and provides the highest coverage and the most complete picture of coded knowledge about T2DM patients' current conditions, previous profiles, and T2DM-related aspects, including complications, symptoms, lab tests, interactions, treatment plan (TP) frameworks, and glucose-related diseases and medications. It adheres to the design principles recommended by the Open Biomedical Ontologies Foundry and is based on ontological realism that follows the principles of the Basic Formal Ontology and the Ontology for General Medical Science. DMTO is implemented under Protégé 5.0 in Web Ontology Language (OWL) 2 format and is publicly available through the National Center for Biomedical Ontology's BioPortal at http://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/DMTO . The current version of DMTO includes more than 10,700 classes, 277 relations, 39,425 annotations, 214 semantic rules, and 62,974 axioms. We provide proof of concept for this approach to modeling TPs. CONCLUSION: The ontology is able to collect and analyze most features of T2DM as well as customize chronic TPs with the most appropriate drugs, foods, and physical exercises. DMTO is ready to be used as a knowledge base for semantically intelligent and distributed CDSS systems.

Exploiting graph kernels for high performance biomedical relation extraction.

Panyam NC, Verspoor K, Cohn T … +1 more , Ramamohanarao K

J Biomed Semantics · 2018 Jan · PMID 29382397 · Full text

BACKGROUND: Relation extraction from biomedical publications is an important task in the area of semantic mining of text. Kernel methods for supervised relation extraction are often preferred over manual feature engineer... BACKGROUND: Relation extraction from biomedical publications is an important task in the area of semantic mining of text. Kernel methods for supervised relation extraction are often preferred over manual feature engineering methods, when classifying highly ordered structures such as trees and graphs obtained from syntactic parsing of a sentence. Tree kernels such as the Subset Tree Kernel and Partial Tree Kernel have been shown to be effective for classifying constituency parse trees and basic dependency parse graphs of a sentence. Graph kernels such as the All Path Graph kernel (APG) and Approximate Subgraph Matching (ASM) kernel have been shown to be suitable for classifying general graphs with cycles, such as the enhanced dependency parse graph of a sentence. In this work, we present a high performance Chemical-Induced Disease (CID) relation extraction system. We present a comparative study of kernel methods for the CID task and also extend our study to the Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) extraction task, an important biomedical relation extraction task. We discuss novel modifications to the ASM kernel to boost its performance and a method to apply graph kernels for extracting relations expressed in multiple sentences. RESULTS: Our system for CID relation extraction attains an F-score of 60%, without using external knowledge sources or task specific heuristic or rules. In comparison, the state of the art Chemical-Disease Relation Extraction system achieves an F-score of 56% using an ensemble of multiple machine learning methods, which is then boosted to 61% with a rule based system employing task specific post processing rules. For the CID task, graph kernels outperform tree kernels substantially, and the best performance is obtained with APG kernel that attains an F-score of 60%, followed by the ASM kernel at 57%. The performance difference between the ASM and APG kernels for CID sentence level relation extraction is not significant. In our evaluation of ASM for the PPI task, ASM performed better than APG kernel for the BioInfer dataset, in the Area Under Curve (AUC) measure (74% vs 69%). However, for all the other PPI datasets, namely AIMed, HPRD50, IEPA and LLL, ASM is substantially outperformed by the APG kernel in F-score and AUC measures. CONCLUSIONS: We demonstrate a high performance Chemical Induced Disease relation extraction, without employing external knowledge sources or task specific heuristics. Our work shows that graph kernels are effective in extracting relations that are expressed in multiple sentences. We also show that the graph kernels, namely the ASM and APG kernels, substantially outperform the tree kernels. Among the graph kernels, we showed the ASM kernel as effective for biomedical relation extraction, with comparable performance to the APG kernel for datasets such as the CID-sentence level relation extraction and BioInfer in PPI. Overall, the APG kernel is shown to be significantly more accurate than the ASM kernel, achieving better performance on most datasets.

OpenBiodiv-O: ontology of the OpenBiodiv knowledge management system.

Senderov V, Simov K, Franz N … +6 more , Stoev P, Catapano T, Agosti D, Sautter G, Morris RA, Penev L

J Biomed Semantics · 2018 Jan · PMID 29347997 · Full text

BACKGROUND: The biodiversity domain, and in particular biological taxonomy, is moving in the direction of semantization of its research outputs. The present work introduces OpenBiodiv-O, the ontology that serves as the b... BACKGROUND: The biodiversity domain, and in particular biological taxonomy, is moving in the direction of semantization of its research outputs. The present work introduces OpenBiodiv-O, the ontology that serves as the basis of the OpenBiodiv Knowledge Management System. Our intent is to provide an ontology that fills the gaps between ontologies for biodiversity resources, such as DarwinCore-based ontologies, and semantic publishing ontologies, such as the SPAR Ontologies. We bridge this gap by providing an ontology focusing on biological taxonomy. RESULTS: OpenBiodiv-O introduces classes, properties, and axioms in the domains of scholarly biodiversity publishing and biological taxonomy and aligns them with several important domain ontologies (FaBiO, DoCO, DwC, Darwin-SW, NOMEN, ENVO). By doing so, it bridges the ontological gap across scholarly biodiversity publishing and biological taxonomy and allows for the creation of a Linked Open Dataset (LOD) of biodiversity information (a biodiversity knowledge graph) and enables the creation of the OpenBiodiv Knowledge Management System. A key feature of the ontology is that it is an ontology of the scientific process of biological taxonomy and not of any particular state of knowledge. This feature allows it to express a multiplicity of scientific opinions. The resulting OpenBiodiv knowledge system may gain a high level of trust in the scientific community as it does not force a scientific opinion on its users (e.g. practicing taxonomists, library researchers, etc.), but rather provides the tools for experts to encode different views as science progresses. CONCLUSIONS: OpenBiodiv-O provides a conceptual model of the structure of a biodiversity publication and the development of related taxonomic concepts. It also serves as the basis for the OpenBiodiv Knowledge Management System.

MIRO: guidelines for minimum information for the reporting of an ontology.

Matentzoglu N, Malone J, Mungall C … +1 more , Stevens R

J Biomed Semantics · 2018 Jan · PMID 29347969 · Full text

BACKGROUND: Creation and use of ontologies has become a mainstream activity in many disciplines, in particular, the biomedical domain. Ontology developers often disseminate information about these ontologies in peer-revi... BACKGROUND: Creation and use of ontologies has become a mainstream activity in many disciplines, in particular, the biomedical domain. Ontology developers often disseminate information about these ontologies in peer-reviewed ontology description reports. There appears to be, however, a high degree of variability in the content of these reports. Often, important details are omitted such that it is difficult to gain a sufficient understanding of the ontology, its content and method of creation. RESULTS: We propose the Minimum Information for Reporting an Ontology (MIRO) guidelines as a means to facilitate a higher degree of completeness and consistency between ontology documentation, including published papers, and ultimately a higher standard of report quality. A draft of the MIRO guidelines was circulated for public comment in the form of a questionnaire, and we subsequently collected 110 responses from ontology authors, developers, users and reviewers. We report on the feedback of this consultation, including comments on each guideline, and present our analysis on the relative importance of each MIRO information item. These results were used to update the MIRO guidelines, mainly by providing more detailed operational definitions of the individual items and assigning degrees of importance. Based on our revised version of MIRO, we conducted a review of 15 recently published ontology description reports from three important journals in the Semantic Web and Biomedical domain and analysed them for compliance with the MIRO guidelines. We found that only 41.38% of the information items were covered by the majority of the papers (and deemed important by the survey respondents) and a large number of important items are not covered at all, like those related to testing and versioning policies. CONCLUSIONS: We believe that the community-reviewed MIRO guidelines can contribute to improving significantly the quality of ontology description reports and other documentation, in particular by increasing consistent reporting of important ontology features that are otherwise often neglected.

Tackling the challenges of matching biomedical ontologies.

Faria D, Pesquita C, Mott I … +3 more , Martins C, Couto FM, Cruz IF

J Biomed Semantics · 2018 Jan · PMID 29335022 · Full text

BACKGROUND: Biomedical ontologies pose several challenges to ontology matching due both to the complexity of the biomedical domain and to the characteristics of the ontologies themselves. The biomedical tracks in the Ont... BACKGROUND: Biomedical ontologies pose several challenges to ontology matching due both to the complexity of the biomedical domain and to the characteristics of the ontologies themselves. The biomedical tracks in the Ontology Matching Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) have spurred the development of matching systems able to tackle these challenges, and benchmarked their general performance. In this study, we dissect the strategies employed by matching systems to tackle the challenges of matching biomedical ontologies and gauge the impact of the challenges themselves on matching performance, using the AgreementMakerLight (AML) system as the platform for this study. RESULTS: We demonstrate that the linear complexity of the hash-based searching strategy implemented by most state-of-the-art ontology matching systems is essential for matching large biomedical ontologies efficiently. We show that accounting for all lexical annotations (e.g., labels and synonyms) in biomedical ontologies leads to a substantial improvement in F-measure over using only the primary name, and that accounting for the reliability of different types of annotations generally also leads to a marked improvement. Finally, we show that cross-references are a reliable source of information and that, when using biomedical ontologies as background knowledge, it is generally more reliable to use them as mediators than to perform lexical expansion. CONCLUSIONS: We anticipate that translating traditional matching algorithms to the hash-based searching paradigm will be a critical direction for the future development of the field. Improving the evaluation carried out in the biomedical tracks of the OAEI will also be important, as without proper reference alignments there is only so much that can be ascertained about matching systems or strategies. Nevertheless, it is clear that, to tackle the various challenges posed by biomedical ontologies, ontology matching systems must be able to efficiently combine multiple strategies into a mature matching approach.

The eXtensible ontology development (XOD) principles and tool implementation to support ontology interoperability.

He Y, Xiang Z, Zheng J … +3 more , Lin Y, Overton JA, Ong E

J Biomed Semantics · 2018 Jan · PMID 29329592 · Full text

Ontologies are critical to data/metadata and knowledge standardization, sharing, and analysis. With hundreds of biological and biomedical ontologies developed, it has become critical to ensure ontology interoperability a... Ontologies are critical to data/metadata and knowledge standardization, sharing, and analysis. With hundreds of biological and biomedical ontologies developed, it has become critical to ensure ontology interoperability and the usage of interoperable ontologies for standardized data representation and integration. The suite of web-based Ontoanimal tools (e.g., Ontofox, Ontorat, and Ontobee) support different aspects of extensible ontology development. By summarizing the common features of Ontoanimal and other similar tools, we identified and proposed an "eXtensible Ontology Development" (XOD) strategy and its associated four principles. These XOD principles reuse existing terms and semantic relations from reliable ontologies, develop and apply well-established ontology design patterns (ODPs), and involve community efforts to support new ontology development, promoting standardized and interoperable data and knowledge representation and integration. The adoption of the XOD strategy, together with robust XOD tool development, will greatly support ontology interoperability and robust ontology applications to support data to be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (i.e., FAIR).

CUILESS2016: a clinical corpus applying compositional normalization of text mentions.

Osborne JD, Neu MB, Danila MI … +2 more , Solorio T, Bethard SJ

J Biomed Semantics · 2018 Jan · PMID 29316970 · Full text

BACKGROUND: Traditionally text mention normalization corpora have normalized concepts to single ontology identifiers ("pre-coordinated concepts"). Less frequently, normalization corpora have used concepts with multiple i... BACKGROUND: Traditionally text mention normalization corpora have normalized concepts to single ontology identifiers ("pre-coordinated concepts"). Less frequently, normalization corpora have used concepts with multiple identifiers ("post-coordinated concepts") but the additional identifiers have been restricted to a defined set of relationships to the core concept. This approach limits the ability of the normalization process to express semantic meaning. We generated a freely available corpus using post-coordinated concepts without a defined set of relationships that we term "compositional concepts" to evaluate their use in clinical text. METHODS: We annotated 5397 disorder mentions from the ShARe corpus to SNOMED CT that were previously normalized as "CUI-less" in the "SemEval-2015 Task 14" shared task because they lacked a pre-coordinated mapping. Unlike the previous normalization method, we do not restrict concept mappings to a particular set of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) semantic types and allow normalization to occur to multiple UMLS Concept Unique Identifiers (CUIs). We computed annotator agreement and assessed semantic coverage with this method. RESULTS: We generated the largest clinical text normalization corpus to date with mappings to multiple identifiers and made it freely available. All but 8 of the 5397 disorder mentions were normalized using this methodology. Annotator agreement ranged from 52.4% using the strictest metric (exact matching) to 78.2% using a hierarchical agreement that measures the overlap of shared ancestral nodes. CONCLUSION: Our results provide evidence that compositional concepts can increase semantic coverage in clinical text. To our knowledge we provide the first freely available corpus of compositional concept annotation in clinical text.

Improving the interoperability of biomedical ontologies with compound alignments.

Oliveira D, Pesquita C

J Biomed Semantics · 2018 Jan · PMID 29316968 · Full text

BACKGROUND: Ontologies are commonly used to annotate and help process life sciences data. Although their original goal is to facilitate integration and interoperability among heterogeneous data sources, when these source... BACKGROUND: Ontologies are commonly used to annotate and help process life sciences data. Although their original goal is to facilitate integration and interoperability among heterogeneous data sources, when these sources are annotated with distinct ontologies, bridging this gap can be challenging. In the last decade, ontology matching systems have been evolving and are now capable of producing high-quality mappings for life sciences ontologies, usually limited to the equivalence between two ontologies. However, life sciences research is becoming increasingly transdisciplinary and integrative, fostering the need to develop matching strategies that are able to handle multiple ontologies and more complex relations between their concepts. RESULTS: We have developed ontology matching algorithms that are able to find compound mappings between multiple biomedical ontologies, in the form of ternary mappings, finding for instance that "aortic valve stenosis"(HP:0001650) is equivalent to the intersection between "aortic valve"(FMA:7236) and "constricted" (PATO:0001847). The algorithms take advantage of search space filtering based on partial mappings between ontology pairs, to be able to handle the increased computational demands. The evaluation of the algorithms has shown that they are able to produce meaningful results, with precision in the range of 60-92% for new mappings. The algorithms were also applied to the potential extension of logical definitions of the OBO and the matching of several plant-related ontologies. CONCLUSIONS: This work is a first step towards finding more complex relations between multiple ontologies. The evaluation shows that the results produced are significant and that the algorithms could satisfy specific integration needs.

An automatic approach for constructing a knowledge base of symptoms in Chinese.

Ruan T, Wang M, Sun J … +4 more , Wang T, Zeng L, Yin Y, Gao J

J Biomed Semantics · 2017 Sep · PMID 29297414 · Full text

BACKGROUND: While a large number of well-known knowledge bases (KBs) in life science have been published as Linked Open Data, there are few KBs in Chinese. However, KBs in Chinese are necessary when we want to automatica... BACKGROUND: While a large number of well-known knowledge bases (KBs) in life science have been published as Linked Open Data, there are few KBs in Chinese. However, KBs in Chinese are necessary when we want to automatically process and analyze electronic medical records (EMRs) in Chinese. Of all, the symptom KB in Chinese is the most seriously in need, since symptoms are the starting point of clinical diagnosis. RESULTS: We publish a public KB of symptoms in Chinese, including symptoms, departments, diseases, medicines, and examinations as well as relations between symptoms and the above related entities. To the best of our knowledge, there is no such KB focusing on symptoms in Chinese, and the KB is an important supplement to existing medical resources. Our KB is constructed by fusing data automatically extracted from eight mainstream healthcare websites, three Chinese encyclopedia sites, and symptoms extracted from a larger number of EMRs as supplements. METHODS: Firstly, we design data schema manually by reference to the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). Secondly, we extract entities from eight mainstream healthcare websites, which are fed as seeds to train a multi-class classifier and classify entities from encyclopedia sites and train a Conditional Random Field (CRF) model to extract symptoms from EMRs. Thirdly, we fuse data to solve the large-scale duplication between different data sources according to entity type alignment, entity mapping, and attribute mapping. Finally, we link our KB to UMLS to investigate similarities and differences between symptoms in Chinese and English. CONCLUSIONS: As a result, the KB has more than 26,000 distinct symptoms in Chinese including 3968 symptoms in traditional Chinese medicine and 1029 synonym pairs for symptoms. The KB also includes concepts such as diseases and medicines as well as relations between symptoms and the above related entities. We also link our KB to the Unified Medical Language System and analyze the differences between symptoms in the two KBs. We released the KB as Linked Open Data and a demo at https://datahub.io/dataset/symptoms-in-chinese .

DisSetSim: an online system for calculating similarity between disease sets.

Hu Y, Zhao L, Liu Z … +5 more , Ju H, Shi H, Xu P, Wang Y, Cheng L

J Biomed Semantics · 2017 Sep · PMID 29297411 · Full text

BACKGROUND: Functional similarity between molecules results in similar phenotypes, such as diseases. Therefore, it is an effective way to reveal the function of molecules based on their induced diseases. However, the lac... BACKGROUND: Functional similarity between molecules results in similar phenotypes, such as diseases. Therefore, it is an effective way to reveal the function of molecules based on their induced diseases. However, the lack of a tool for obtaining the similarity score of pair-wise disease sets (SSDS) limits this type of application. RESULTS: Here, we introduce DisSetSim, an online system to solve this problem in this article. Five state-of-the-art methods involving Resnik's, Lin's, Wang's, PSB, and SemFunSim methods were implemented to measure the similarity score of pair-wise diseases (SSD) first. And then "pair-wise-best pairs-average" (PWBPA) method was implemented to calculated the SSDS by the SSD. The system was applied for calculating the functional similarity of miRNAs based on their induced disease sets. The results were further used to predict potential disease-miRNA relationships. CONCLUSIONS: The high area under the receiver operating characteristic curve AUC (0.9296) based on leave-one-out cross validation shows that the PWBPA method achieves a high true positive rate and a low false positive rate. The system can be accessed from http://www.bio-annotation.cn:8080/DisSetSim/ .

A novel method to identify pre-microRNA in various species knowledge base on various species.

Zhao T, Zhang N, Zhang Y … +5 more , Ren J, Xu P, Liu Z, Cheng L, Hu Y

J Biomed Semantics · 2017 Sep · PMID 29297389 · Full text

BACKGROUND: More than 1/3 of human genes are regulated by microRNAs. The identification of microRNA (miRNA) is the precondition of discovering the regulatory mechanism of miRNA and developing the cure for genetic disease... BACKGROUND: More than 1/3 of human genes are regulated by microRNAs. The identification of microRNA (miRNA) is the precondition of discovering the regulatory mechanism of miRNA and developing the cure for genetic diseases. The traditional identification method is biological experiment, but it has the defects of long period, high cost, and missing the miRNAs that but also many other algorithms only exist in a specific period or low expression level. Therefore, to overcome these defects, machine learning method is applied to identify miRNAs. RESULTS: In this study, for identifying real and pseudo miRNAs and classifying different species, we extracted 98 dimensional features based on the primary and secondary structure, then we proposed the BP-Adaboost method to figure out the overfitting phenomenon of BP neural network by constructing multiple BP neural network classifiers and distributed weights to these classifiers. The novel method we proposed, from the 4 evaluation terms, have achieved greatly improvement on the effect of identifying true pre-RNA compared to other methods. And from the respect of identifying species of pre-RNA, the novel method achieved more accuracy than other algorithms. CONCLUSIONS: The BP-Adaboost method has achieved more than 98% accuracy in identifying real and pseudo miRNAs. It is much higher than not only BP but also many other algorithms. In the second experiment, restricted by the data, the algorithm could not get high accuracy in identifying 7 species, but also better than other algorithms.

Revealing protein functions based on relationships of interacting proteins and GO terms.

Teng Z, Guo M, Liu X … +2 more , Tian Z, Che K

J Biomed Semantics · 2017 Sep · PMID 29297388 · Full text

BACKGROUND: In recent years, numerous computational methods predicted protein function based on the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network. These methods supposed that two proteins share the same function if they inte... BACKGROUND: In recent years, numerous computational methods predicted protein function based on the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network. These methods supposed that two proteins share the same function if they interact with each other. However, it is reported by recent studies that the functions of two interacting proteins may be just related. It will mislead the prediction of protein function. Therefore, there is a need for investigating the functional relationship between interacting proteins. RESULTS: In this paper, the functional relationship between interacting proteins is studied and a novel method, called as GoDIN, is advanced to annotate functions of interacting proteins in Gene Ontology (GO) context. It is assumed that the functional difference between interacting proteins can be expressed by semantic difference between GO term and its relatives. Thus, the method uses GO term and its relatives to annotate the interacting proteins separately according to their functional roles in the PPI network. The method is validated by a series of experiments and compared with the concerned method. The experimental results confirm the assumption and suggest that GoDIN is effective on predicting functions of protein. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates that: (1) interacting proteins are not equal in the PPI network, and their function may be same or similar, or just related; (2) functional difference between interacting proteins can be measured by their degrees in the PPI network; (3) functional relationship between interacting proteins can be expressed by relationship between GO term and its relatives.

Constructing an integrated gene similarity network for the identification of disease genes.

Tian Z, Guo M, Wang C … +3 more , Xing L, Wang L, Zhang Y

J Biomed Semantics · 2017 Sep · PMID 29297379 · Full text

BACKGROUND: Discovering novel genes that are involved human diseases is a challenging task in biomedical research. In recent years, several computational approaches have been proposed to prioritize candidate disease gene... BACKGROUND: Discovering novel genes that are involved human diseases is a challenging task in biomedical research. In recent years, several computational approaches have been proposed to prioritize candidate disease genes. Most of these methods are mainly based on protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. However, since these PPI networks contain false positives and only cover less half of known human genes, their reliability and coverage are very low. Therefore, it is highly necessary to fuse multiple genomic data to construct a credible gene similarity network and then infer disease genes on the whole genomic scale. RESULTS: We proposed a novel method, named RWRB, to infer causal genes of interested diseases. First, we construct five individual gene (protein) similarity networks based on multiple genomic data of human genes. Then, an integrated gene similarity network (IGSN) is reconstructed based on similarity network fusion (SNF) method. Finally, we employee the random walk with restart algorithm on the phenotype-gene bilayer network, which combines phenotype similarity network, IGSN as well as phenotype-gene association network, to prioritize candidate disease genes. We investigate the effectiveness of RWRB through leave-one-out cross-validation methods in inferring phenotype-gene relationships. Results show that RWRB is more accurate than state-of-the-art methods on most evaluation metrics. Further analysis shows that the success of RWRB is benefited from IGSN which has a wider coverage and higher reliability comparing with current PPI networks. Moreover, we conduct a comprehensive case study for Alzheimer's disease and predict some novel disease genes that supported by literature. CONCLUSIONS: RWRB is an effective and reliable algorithm in prioritizing candidate disease genes on the genomic scale. Software and supplementary information are available at http://nclab.hit.edu.cn/~tianzhen/RWRB/ .

Investigations on factors influencing HPO-based semantic similarity calculation.

Peng J, Li Q, Shang X

J Biomed Semantics · 2017 Sep · PMID 29297376 · Full text

BACKGROUND: Although disease diagnosis has greatly benefited from next generation sequencing technologies, it is still difficult to make the right diagnosis purely based on sequencing technologies for many diseases with... BACKGROUND: Although disease diagnosis has greatly benefited from next generation sequencing technologies, it is still difficult to make the right diagnosis purely based on sequencing technologies for many diseases with complex phenotypes and high genetic heterogeneity. Recently, calculating Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO)-based phenotype semantic similarity has contributed a lot for completing disease diagnosis. However, factors which affect the accuracy of HPO-based semantic similarity have not been evaluated systematically. RESULTS: In this study, we proposed a new framework called HPOFactor to evaluate these factors. Our model includes four components: (1) the size of annotation set, (2) the evidence code of annotations, (3) the quality of annotations and (4) the coverage of annotations respectively. CONCLUSIONS: HPOFactor analyzes the four factors systematically based on two kinds of experiments: causative gene prediction and disease prediction. Furthermore, semantic similarity measurement could be designed based on the characteristic of these factors.

Dynamically analyzing cell interactions in biological environments using multiagent social learning framework.

Zhang C, Li X, Li S … +1 more , Feng Z

J Biomed Semantics · 2017 Sep · PMID 29297360 · Full text

BACKGROUND: Biological environment is uncertain and its dynamic is similar to the multiagent environment, thus the research results of the multiagent system area can provide valuable insights to the understanding of biol... BACKGROUND: Biological environment is uncertain and its dynamic is similar to the multiagent environment, thus the research results of the multiagent system area can provide valuable insights to the understanding of biology and are of great significance for the study of biology. Learning in a multiagent environment is highly dynamic since the environment is not stationary anymore and each agent's behavior changes adaptively in response to other coexisting learners, and vice versa. The dynamics becomes more unpredictable when we move from fixed-agent interaction environments to multiagent social learning framework. Analytical understanding of the underlying dynamics is important and challenging. RESULTS: In this work, we present a social learning framework with homogeneous learners (e.g., Policy Hill Climbing (PHC) learners), and model the behavior of players in the social learning framework as a hybrid dynamical system. By analyzing the dynamical system, we obtain some conditions about convergence or non-convergence. We experimentally verify the predictive power of our model using a number of representative games. Experimental results confirm the theoretical analysis. CONCLUSION: Under multiagent social learning framework, we modeled the behavior of agent in biologic environment, and theoretically analyzed the dynamics of the model. We present some sufficient conditions about convergence or non-convergence and prove them theoretically. It can be used to predict the convergence of the system.

Multiple kernels learning-based biological entity relationship extraction method.

Dongliang X, Jingchang P, Bailing W

J Biomed Semantics · 2017 Sep · PMID 29297359 · Full text

BACKGROUND: Automatic extracting protein entity interaction information from biomedical literature can help to build protein relation network and design new drugs. There are more than 20 million literature abstracts incl... BACKGROUND: Automatic extracting protein entity interaction information from biomedical literature can help to build protein relation network and design new drugs. There are more than 20 million literature abstracts included in MEDLINE, which is the most authoritative textual database in the field of biomedicine, and follow an exponential growth over time. This frantic expansion of the biomedical literature can often be difficult to absorb or manually analyze. Thus efficient and automated search engines are necessary to efficiently explore the biomedical literature using text mining techniques. RESULTS: The P, R, and F value of tag graph method in Aimed corpus are 50.82, 69.76, and 58.61%, respectively. The P, R, and F value of tag graph kernel method in other four evaluation corpuses are 2-5% higher than that of all-paths graph kernel. And The P, R and F value of feature kernel and tag graph kernel fuse methods is 53.43, 71.62 and 61.30%, respectively. The P, R and F value of feature kernel and tag graph kernel fuse methods is 55.47, 70.29 and 60.37%, respectively. It indicated that the performance of the two kinds of kernel fusion methods is better than that of simple kernel. CONCLUSION: In comparison with the all-paths graph kernel method, the tag graph kernel method is superior in terms of overall performance. Experiments show that the performance of the multi-kernels method is better than that of the three separate single-kernel method and the dual-mutually fused kernel method used hereof in five corpus sets.

Integrating phenotype ontologies with PhenomeNET.

Rodríguez-García MÁ, Gkoutos GV, Schofield PN … +1 more , Hoehndorf R

J Biomed Semantics · 2017 Dec · PMID 29258588 · Full text

BACKGROUND: Integration and analysis of phenotype data from humans and model organisms is a key challenge in building our understanding of normal biology and pathophysiology. However, the range of phenotypes and anatomic... BACKGROUND: Integration and analysis of phenotype data from humans and model organisms is a key challenge in building our understanding of normal biology and pathophysiology. However, the range of phenotypes and anatomical details being captured in clinical and model organism databases presents complex problems when attempting to match classes across species and across phenotypes as diverse as behaviour and neoplasia. We have previously developed PhenomeNET, a system for disease gene prioritization that includes as one of its components an ontology designed to integrate phenotype ontologies. While not applicable to matching arbitrary ontologies, PhenomeNET can be used to identify related phenotypes in different species, including human, mouse, zebrafish, nematode worm, fruit fly, and yeast. RESULTS: Here, we apply the PhenomeNET to identify related classes from two phenotype and two disease ontologies using automated reasoning. We demonstrate that we can identify a large number of mappings, some of which require automated reasoning and cannot easily be identified through lexical approaches alone. Combining automated reasoning with lexical matching further improves results in aligning ontologies. CONCLUSIONS: PhenomeNET can be used to align and integrate phenotype ontologies. The results can be utilized for biomedical analyses in which phenomena observed in model organisms are used to identify causative genes and mutations underlying human disease.

Identifying genotype-phenotype relationships in biomedical text.

Khordad M, Mercer RE

J Biomed Semantics · 2017 Dec · PMID 29212530 · Full text

BACKGROUND: One important type of information contained in biomedical research literature is the newly discovered relationships between phenotypes and genotypes. Because of the large quantity of literature, a reliable au... BACKGROUND: One important type of information contained in biomedical research literature is the newly discovered relationships between phenotypes and genotypes. Because of the large quantity of literature, a reliable automatic system to identify this information for future curation is essential. Such a system provides important and up to date data for database construction and updating, and even text summarization. In this paper we present a machine learning method to identify these genotype-phenotype relationships. No large human-annotated corpus of genotype-phenotype relationships currently exists. So, a semi-automatic approach has been used to annotate a small labelled training set and a self-training method is proposed to annotate more sentences and enlarge the training set. RESULTS: The resulting machine-learned model was evaluated using a separate test set annotated by an expert. The results show that using only the small training set in a supervised learning method achieves good results (precision: 76.47, recall: 77.61, F-measure: 77.03) which are improved by applying a self-training method (precision: 77.70, recall: 77.84, F-measure: 77.77). CONCLUSIONS: Relationships between genotypes and phenotypes is biomedical information pivotal to the understanding of a patient's situation. Our proposed method is the first attempt to make a specialized system to identify genotype-phenotype relationships in biomedical literature. We achieve good results using a small training set. To improve the results other linguistic contexts need to be explored and an appropriately enlarged training set is required.
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