OBJECTIVE: Given the importance AI in genomics and its potential impact on human health, the American Medical Informatics Association-Genomics and Translational Biomedical Informatics (GenTBI) Workgroup developed this assessment of factors that can further enable the clinical application of AI in this space. PROCESS: A list of relevant factors was developed through GenTBI workgroup discussions in multiple in-person and online meetings, along with review of pertinent publications. This list was then summarized and reviewed to achieve consensus among the group members. CONCLUSIONS: Substantial informatics research and development are needed to fully realize the clinical potential of such technologies. The development of larger datasets is crucial to emulating the success AI is achieving in other domains. It is important that AI methods do not exacerbate existing socio-economic, racial, and ethnic disparities. Genomic data standards are critical to effectively scale such technologies across institutions. With so much uncertainty, complexity and novelty in genomics and medicine, and with an evolving regulatory environment, the current focus should be on using these technologies in an interface with clinicians that emphasizes the value each brings to clinical decision-making.

Mental illness is increasingly recognized as both a significant cost to society and a significant area of opportunity for biological breakthrough. As -omics and imaging technologies enable researchers to probe molecular and physiological underpinnings of multiple diseases, opportunities arise to explore the biological basis for behavioral health and disease. From individual investigators to large international consortia, researchers have generated rich data sets in the area of mental health, including genomic, transcriptomic, metabolomic, proteomic, clinical and imaging resources. General data repositories such as the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP) and mental health (MH)-specific initiatives, such as the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, MH Research Network and PsychENCODE represent a wealth of information yet to be gleaned. At the same time, novel approaches to integrate and analyze data sets are enabling important discoveries in the area of mental and behavioral health. This review will discuss and catalog into an organizing framework the increasingly diverse set of MH data resources available, using schizophrenia as a focus area, and will describe novel and integrative approaches to molecular biomarker discovery that make use of mental health data.

The recent announcement of the Precision Medicine Initiative by President Obama has brought precision medicine (PM) to the forefront for healthcare providers, researchers, regulators, innovators, and funders alike. As technologies continue to evolve and datasets grow in magnitude, a strong computational infrastructure will be essential to realize PM's vision of improved healthcare derived from personal data. In addition, informatics research and innovation affords a tremendous opportunity to drive the science underlying PM. The informatics community must lead the development of technologies and methodologies that will increase the discovery and application of biomedical knowledge through close collaboration between researchers, clinicians, and patients. This perspective highlights seven key areas that are in need of further informatics research and innovation to support the realization of PM.

Background Genes work in concert as a system, not as independent entities, to mediate disease states. There has been considerable interest in understanding variations in molecular signatures between normal and disease states. The selective-voting convex-hull ensemble procedure accommodates molecular heterogeneity within and between groups and allows retrieval of sample-specific sets and investigation of variations in individual networks relevant to personalized medicine[1]. The work here describes using the convex-hull voting method on a large data set. Using parallelization techniques, we predict that we can execute the convex-hull voting algorithm on the University of Kentucky cluster (DLX) using a dataset much too large to run in a feasible time on a single machine.

OBJECTIVE: Modelling the associations from high-throughput experimental molecular data has provided unprecedented insights into biological pathways and signalling mechanisms. Graphical models and networks have especially proven to be useful abstractions in this regard. Ad hoc thresholds are often used in conjunction with structure learning algorithms to determine significant associations. The present study overcomes this limitation by proposing a statistically motivated approach for identifying significant associations in a network. METHODS AND MATERIALS: A new method that identifies significant associations in graphical models by estimating the threshold minimising the L1 norm between the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the observed edge confidences and those of its asymptotic counterpart is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated on popular synthetic data sets as well as publicly available experimental molecular data corresponding to gene and protein expression profiles. RESULTS: The improved performance of the proposed approach is demonstrated across the synthetic data sets using sensitivity, specificity and accuracy as performance metrics. The results are also demonstrated across varying sample sizes and three different structure learning algorithms with widely varying assumptions. In all cases, the proposed approach has specificity and accuracy close to 1, while sensitivity increases linearly in the logarithm of the sample size. The estimated threshold systematically outperforms common ad hoc ones in terms of sensitivity while maintaining comparable levels of specificity and accuracy. Networks from experimental data sets are reconstructed accurately with respect to the results from the original papers. CONCLUSION: Current studies use structure learning algorithms in conjunction with ad hoc thresholds for identifying significant associations in graphical abstractions of biological pathways and signalling mechanisms. Such an ad hoc choice can have pronounced effect on attributing biological significance to the associations in the resulting network and possible downstream analysis. The statistically motivated approach presented in this study has been shown to outperform ad hoc thresholds and is expected to alleviate spurious conclusions of significant associations in such graphical abstractions.

The discovery of the visible light-emitting diode (LED) 50 years ago by Holonyak and Bevacqua and the associated demonstration of the viability of the III-V semiconductor alloy created a foundational basis for the field of optoelectronics. Key advances which enabled the progression from the first visible LED to today's III-V photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are described. Furthermore, the current state-of-the-art 500-Gb/s and 1-Tb/s large-scale InP transmitter and receiver PICs and their essential role in the optical communications networks are reviewed.

BACKGROUND: There has been recent interest in capturing the functional relationships (FRs) from high-throughput assays using suitable computational techniques. FRs elucidate the working of genes in concert as a system as opposed to independent entities hence may provide preliminary insights into biological pathways and signalling mechanisms. Bayesian structure learning (BSL) techniques and its extensions have been used successfully for modelling FRs from expression profiles. Such techniques are especially useful in discovering undocumented FRs, investigating non-canonical signalling mechanisms and cross-talk between pathways. The objective of the present study is to develop a graphical user interface (GUI), NATbox: Network Analysis Toolbox in the language R that houses a battery of BSL algorithms in conjunction with suitable statistical tools for modelling FRs in the form of acyclic networks from gene expression profiles and their subsequent analysis. RESULTS: NATbox is a menu-driven open-source GUI implemented in the R statistical language for modelling and analysis of FRs from gene expression profiles. It provides options to (i) impute missing observations in the given data (ii) model FRs and network structure from gene expression profiles using a battery of BSL algorithms and identify robust dependencies using a bootstrap procedure, (iii) present the FRs in the form of acyclic graphs for visualization and investigate its topological properties using network analysis metrics, (iv) retrieve FRs of interest from published literature. Subsequently, use these FRs as structural priors in BSL (v) enhance scalability of BSL across high-dimensional data by parallelizing the bootstrap routines. CONCLUSION: NATbox provides a menu-driven GUI for modelling and analysis of FRs from gene expression profiles. By incorporating readily available functions from existing R-packages, it minimizes redundancy and improves reproducibility, transparency and sustainability, characteristic of open-source environments. NATbox is especially suited for interdisciplinary researchers and biologists with minimal programming experience and would like to use systems biology approaches without delving into the algorithmic aspects. The GUI provides appropriate parameter recommendations for the various menu options including default parameter choices for the user. NATbox can also prove to be a useful demonstration and teaching tool in graduate and undergraduate course in systems biology. It has been tested successfully under Windows and Linux operating systems. The source code along with installation instructions and accompanying tutorial can be found at http://bioinformatics.ualr.edu/natboxWiki/index.php/Main_Page.

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In this paper, correlation of the pixels comprising a microarray spot is investigated. Subsequently, correlation statistics, namely, Pearson correlation and Spearman rank correlation, are used to segment the foreground and background intensity of microarray spots. The performance of correlation-based segmentation is compared to clustering-based (PAM, k-means) and seeded-region growing techniques (SPOT). It is shown that correlation-based segmentation is useful in flagging poorly hybridized spots, thus minimizing false-positives. The present study also raises the intriguing question of whether a change in correlation can be an indicator of differential gene expression.

The underlying principle in microarray image analysis is that the spot intensity is a measure of the gene expression. This implicitly assumes the gene expression of a spot to be governed entirely by the distribution of the pixel intensities. Thus, a segmentation technique based on the distribution of the pixel intensities is appropriate for the current problem. In this paper, clustering-based segmentation is described to extract the target intensity of the spots. The approximate boundaries of the spots in the microarray are determined by manual adjustment of rectilinear grids. The distribution of the pixel intensity in a grid containing a spot is assumed to be the superposition of the foreground and the local background. The k-means clustering technique and the partitioning around medoids (PAM) were used to generate a binary partition of the pixel intensity distribution. The median (k-means) and the medoid (PAM) of the cluster members are chosen as the cluster representatives. The effectiveness of the clustering-based segmentation techniques was tested on publicly available arrays generated in a lipid metabolism experiment (Callow et al., 2000). The results are compared against those obtained using the region-growing approach (SPOT) (Yang et al., 2001). The effect of additive white Gaussian noise is also investigated.