Rare disease knowledge enrichment through a data-driven approach

Feichen Shen, Yiqing Zhao, Liwei Wang, Majid Rastegar Mojarad, Yanshan Wang, Sijia Liu, Hongfang Liu

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

Background: Existing resources to assist the diagnosis of rare diseases are usually curated from the literature that can be limited for clinical use. It often takes substantial effort before the suspicion of a rare disease is even raised to utilize those resources. The primary goal of this study was to apply a data-driven approach to enrich existing rare disease resources by mining phenotype-disease associations from electronic medical record (EMR). Methods: We first applied association rule mining algorithms on EMR to extract significant phenotype-disease associations and enriched existing rare disease resources (Human Phenotype Ontology and Orphanet (HPO-Orphanet)). We generated phenotype-disease bipartite graphs for HPO-Orphanet, EMR, and enriched knowledge base HPO-Orphanet + and conducted a case study on Hodgkin lymphoma to compare performance on differential diagnosis among these three graphs. Results: We used disease-disease similarity generated by the eRAM, an existing rare disease encyclopedia, as a gold standard to compare the three graphs with sensitivity and specificity as (0.17, 0.36, 0.46) and (0.52, 0.47, 0.51) for three graphs respectively. We also compared the top 15 diseases generated by the HPO-Orphanet + graph with eRAM and another clinical diagnostic tool, the Phenomizer. Conclusions: Per our evaluation results, our approach was able to enrich existing rare disease knowledge resources with phenotype-disease associations from EMR and thus support rare disease differential diagnosis.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number32
JournalBMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
Volume19
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 14 2019

Keywords

  • Data-driven approach
  • Differential diagnosis
  • Knowledge enrichment
  • Rare disease

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Health Policy
  • Health Informatics

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