BACKGROUND: Integration of multi-omics data can provide a more complex view of the biological system consisting of different interconnected molecular components, the crucial aspect for developing novel personalised therapeutic strategies for complex diseases. Various tools have been developed to integrate multi-omics data. However, an efficient multi-omics framework for regulatory network inference at the genome level that incorporates prior knowledge is still to emerge. RESULTS: We present IntOMICS, an efficient integrative framework based on Bayesian networks. IntOMICS systematically analyses gene expression, DNA methylation, copy number variation and biological prior knowledge to infer regulatory networks. IntOMICS complements the missing biological prior knowledge by so-called empirical biological knowledge, estimated from the available experimental data. Regulatory networks derived from IntOMICS provide deeper insights into the complex flow of genetic information on top of the increasing accuracy trend compared to a published algorithm designed exclusively for gene expression data. The ability to capture relevant crosstalks between multi-omics modalities is verified using known associations in microsatellite stable/instable colon cancer samples. Additionally, IntOMICS performance is compared with two algorithms for multi-omics regulatory network inference that can also incorporate prior knowledge in the inference framework. IntOMICS is also applied to detect potential predictive biomarkers in microsatellite stable stage III colon cancer samples. CONCLUSIONS: We provide IntOMICS, a framework for multi-omics data integration using a novel approach to biological knowledge discovery. IntOMICS is a powerful resource for exploratory systems biology and can provide valuable insights into the complex mechanisms of biological processes that have a vital role in personalised medicine.

MOTIVATION: Whole genome expression profiling of large cohorts of different types of cancer led to the identification of distinct molecular subcategories (subtypes) that may partially explain the observed inter-tumoral heterogeneity. This is also the case of colorectal cancer (CRC) where several such categorizations have been proposed. Despite recent developments, the problem of subtype definition and recognition remains open, one of the causes being the intrinsic heterogeneity of each tumor, which is difficult to estimate from gene expression profiles. However, one of the observations of these studies indicates that there may be links between the dominant tumor morphology characteristics and the molecular subtypes. Benefiting from a large collection of CRC samples, comprising both gene expression and histopathology images, we investigated the possibility of building image-based classifiers able to predict the molecular subtypes. We employed deep convolutional neural networks for extracting local descriptors which were then used for constructing a dictionary-based representation of each tumor sample. A set of support vector machine classifiers were trained to solve different binary decision problems, their combined outputs being used to predict one of the five molecular subtypes. RESULTS: A hierarchical decomposition of the multi-class problem was obtained with an overall accuracy of 0.84 (95%CI=0.79-0.88). The predictions from the image-based classifier showed significant prognostic value similar to their molecular counterparts. CONTACT: [email protected]. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Source code used for the image analysis is freely available from https://github.com/higex/qpath . SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

BACKGROUND: Genomics and proteomics are nowadays the dominant techniques for novel biomarker discovery. However, histopathology images contain a wealth of information related to the tumor histology, morphology and tumor-host interactions that is not accessible through these techniques. Thus, integrating the histopathology images in the biomarker discovery workflow could potentially lead to the identification of new image-based biomarkers and the refinement or even replacement of the existing genomic and proteomic signatures. However, extracting meaningful and robust image features to be mined jointly with genomic (and clinical, etc.) data represents a real challenge due to the complexity of the images. RESULTS: We developed a framework for integrating the histopathology images in the biomarker discovery workflow based on the bag-of-features approach - a method that has the advantage of being assumption-free and data-driven. The images were reduced to a set of salient patterns and additional measurements of their spatial distribution, with the resulting features being directly used in a standard biomarker discovery application. We demonstrated this framework in a search for prognostic biomarkers in breast cancer which resulted in the identification of several prognostic image features and a promising multimodal (imaging and genomic) prognostic signature. The source code for the image analysis procedures is freely available. CONCLUSIONS: The framework proposed allows for a joint analysis of images and gene expression data. Its application to a set of breast cancer cases resulted in image-based and combined (image and genomic) prognostic scores for relapse-free survival.

Histopathology imaging and gene expression profiling are two fundamental investigative techniques which allow the analysis of biological specimens from different perspectives. Given their apparent divergence in data representation, they are usually used separately, being connected only at the higher levels of data analysis. In this work we demonstrate how gene expression can be used directly for guiding the selection of prognostically-relevant imaging features. Our method is applied to the analysis of a breast cancer data set, but is not limited to this pathology.

SUMMARY: A top scoring pair (TSP) classifier consists of a pair of variables whose relative ordering can be used for accurately predicting the class label of a sample. This classification rule has the advantage of being easily interpretable and more robust against technical variations in data, as those due to different microarray platforms. Here we describe a parallel implementation of this classifier which significantly reduces the training time, and a number of extensions, including a multi-class approach, which has the potential of improving the classification performance. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Full C++ source code and R package Rgtsp are freely available from http://lausanne.isb-sib.ch/~vpopovic/research/. The implementation relies on existing OpenMP libraries.

BACKGROUND: Gene expression analysis has emerged as a major biological research area, with real-time quantitative reverse transcription PCR (RT-QPCR) being one of the most accurate and widely used techniques for expression profiling of selected genes. In order to obtain results that are comparable across assays, a stable normalization strategy is required. In general, the normalization of PCR measurements between different samples uses one to several control genes (e.g. housekeeping genes), from which a baseline reference level is constructed. Thus, the choice of the control genes is of utmost importance, yet there is not a generally accepted standard technique for screening a large number of candidates and identifying the best ones. RESULTS: We propose a novel approach for scoring and ranking candidate genes for their suitability as control genes. Our approach relies on publicly available microarray data and allows the combination of multiple data sets originating from different platforms and/or representing different pathologies. The use of microarray data allows the screening of tens of thousands of genes, producing very comprehensive lists of candidates. We also provide two lists of candidate control genes: one which is breast cancer-specific and one with more general applicability. Two genes from the breast cancer list which had not been previously used as control genes are identified and validated by RT-QPCR. Open source R functions are available at http://www.isrec.isb-sib.ch/~vpopovic/research/ CONCLUSION: We proposed a new method for identifying candidate control genes for RT-QPCR which was able to rank thousands of genes according to some predefined suitability criteria and we applied it to the case of breast cancer. We also empirically showed that translating the results from microarray to PCR platform was achievable.

A method that exploits an information theoretic framework to extract optimized audio features using video information is presented. A simple measure of mutual information (MI) between the resulting audio and video features allows the detection of the active speaker among different candidates. This method involves the optimization of an Mi-based objective function. No approximation is needed to solve this optimization problem, neither for the estimation of the probability density functions (pdfs) of the features, nor for the cost function itself. The pdfs are estimated from the samples using a nonparametric approach. The challenging optimization problem is solved using a global method: the differential evolution algorithm. Two information theoretic optimization criteria are compared and their ability to extract audio features specific to speech production is discussed. Using these specific audio features, candidate video features are then classified as member of the "speaker" or "non-speaker" class, resulting in a speaker detection scheme. As a result, our method achieves a speaker detection rate of 100% on in-house test sequences, and of 85% on most commonly used sequences.

The use of higher-order local autocorrelations as features for pattern recognition has been acknowledged for many years, but their applicability was restricted to relatively low orders (2 or 3) and small local neighborhoods, due to combinatorial increase in computational costs. A new method for using these features is presented, which allows the use of autocorrelations of any order and of larger neighborhoods. The method is closely related to the classifier used, a support vector machine (SVM), and exploits the special form of the inner products of autocorrelations and the properties of some kernel functions used by SVM. Using SVM, linear and nonlinear classification functions can be learned, extending the previous works on higher-order autocorrelations which were based on linear classifiers.