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Khakabimamaghani, S.

Publications and source records attributed to Khakabimamaghani, S..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Identification of Differentially Expressed Gene Modules in Heterogeneous Diseases

MotivationIdentification of differentially expressed genes is necessary for unraveling disease pathogenesis. This task is complicated by the fact that many diseases are heterogeneous at the molecular level and samples representing distinct disease subtypes may demonstrate different patterns of dysregulation. Biclustering methods are capable of identifying genes that follow a similar expression pattern only in a subset of samples and hence can consider disease heterogeneity. However, identifying biologically significant and reproducible sets of genes and samples remains challenging for the existing tools. Many recent studies have shown that the integration of gene expression and protein interaction data improves the robustness of prediction and classification and advances biomarker discovery. ResultsHere we present DESMOND, a new method for identification of Differentially ExpreSsed gene MOdules iN Diseases. DESMOND performs network-constrained biclustering on gene expression data and identifies gene modules -- connected sets of genes up- or down-regulated in subsets of samples. We applied DESMOND on expression profiles of samples from two large breast cancer cohorts and have shown that the capability of DESMOND to incorporate protein interactions allows identifying the biologically meaningful gene and sample subsets and improves the reproducibility of the results. Availabilityhttps://github.com/ozolotareva/DESMOND Contactozolotareva@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

bioinformatics↗

Uncovering the subtype-specific temporal order of cancer pathway dysregulation

Cancer is driven by genetic mutations that dysregulate pathways important for proper cell function. Therefore, discovering these cancer pathways and their dysregulation order is key to understanding and treating cancer. However, the heterogeneity of mutations between different individuals makes this challenging and requires that cancer progression is studied in a subtype-specific way. To address this challenge, we provide a mathematical model, called Subtype-specific Pathway Linear Progression Model (SPM), that simultaneously captures cancer subtypes and pathways and order of dysregulation of the pathways within each subtype. Experiments with synthetic data indicate the robustness of SPM to problem specifics including noise compared to an existing method. Moreover, experimental results on glioblastoma multiforme and colorectal adenocarcinoma show the consistency of SPMs results with the existing knowledge and its superiority to an existing method in certain cases. The implementation of our method is available at https://github.com/Dalton386/SPM.

bioinformatics↗

SUBSTRA: Supervised Bayesian Patient Stratification

Patient stratification methods are key to the vision of precision medicine. Here, we consider transcriptional data to segment the patient population into subsets relevant to a given phenotype. Whereas most existing patient stratification methods focus either on predictive performance or interpretable features, we developed a method striking a balance between these two important goals. We introduce a Bayesian method called SUBSTRA that uses regularized biclustering to identify patient subtypes and interpretable subtype-specific transcript clusters. The method iteratively re-weights feature importance to optimize phenotype prediction performance by producing more phenotype-relevant patient subtypes. We investigate the performance of SUBSTRA in finding relevant features using simulated data and successfully benchmark it against state-of-the-art unsupervised stratification methods and supervised alternatives. Moreover, SUBSTRA achieves predictive performance competitive with supervised benchmark methods and provides interpretable transcriptional features in diverse biological settings, such as drug response prediction, cancer diagnosis, or kidney transplant rejection.

bioinformatics↗