Personalized diagnosis by cached solutions with hypertension as a study model

Genet Mol Res. 2006 Dec 18;5(4):856-67.

Abstract

Statistical modeling of links between genetic profiles with environmental and clinical data to aid in medical diagnosis is a challenge. Here, we present a computational approach for rapidly selecting important clinical data to assist in medical decisions based on personalized genetic profiles. What could take hours or days of computing is available on-the-fly, making this strategy feasible to implement as a routine without demanding great computing power. The key to rapidly obtaining an optimal/nearly optimal mathematical function that can evaluate the "disease stage" by combining information of genetic profiles with personal clinical data is done by querying a precomputed solution database. The database is previously generated by a new hybrid feature selection method that makes use of support vector machines, recursive feature elimination and random sub-space search. Here, to evaluate the method, data from polymorphisms in the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system genes together with clinical data were obtained from patients with hypertension and control subjects. The disease "risk" was determined by classifying the patients' data with a support vector machine model based on the optimized feature; then measuring the Euclidean distance to the hyperplane decision function. Our results showed the association of renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system gene haplotypes with hypertension. The association of polymorphism patterns with different ethnic groups was also tracked by the feature selection process. A demonstration of this method is also available online on the project's web site.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Case-Control Studies
  • Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Female
  • Genetic Predisposition to Disease*
  • Genotype
  • Humans
  • Hypertension / diagnosis*
  • Hypertension / genetics
  • Male
  • Models, Genetic
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated*
  • Polymorphism, Genetic / genetics*
  • Renin-Angiotensin System / genetics*
  • Reproducibility of Results