Validation of multi-gene biomarkers for clinical outcomes is one of the most important issues for cancer prognosis. An important source of information for virtual validation is the high number of available cancer datasets. Nevertheless, assessing the prognostic performance of a gene expression signature along datasets is a difficult task for Biologists and Physicians and also time-consuming for Statisticians and Bioinformaticians. Therefore, to facilitate performance comparisons and validations of survival biomarkers for cancer outcomes, we developed SurvExpress, a cancer-wide gene expression database with clinical outcomes and a web-based tool that provides survival analysis and risk assessment of cancer datasets. The main input of SurvExpress is only the biomarker gene list. We generated a cancer database collecting more than 20,000 samples and 130 datasets with censored clinical information covering tumors over 20 tissues. We implemented a web interface to perform biomarker validation and comparisons in this database, where a multivariate survival analysis can be accomplished in about one minute. We show the utility and simplicity of SurvExpress in two biomarker applications for breast and lung cancer. Compared to other tools, SurvExpress is the largest, most versatile, and quickest free tool available. SurvExpress web can be accessed in http://bioinformatica.mty.itesm.mx/SurvExpress (a tutorial is included). The website was implemented in JSP, JavaScript, MySQL, and R.
Among the current challenges of the Smart City, traffic management and maintenance are of utmost importance. Road surface monitoring is currently performed by humans, but the road surface condition is one of the main indicators of road quality, and it may drastically affect fuel consumption and the safety of both drivers and pedestrians. Abnormalities in the road, such as manholes and potholes, can cause accidents when not identified by the drivers. Furthermore, human-induced abnormalities, such as speed bumps, could also cause accidents. In addition, while said obstacles ought to be signalized according to specific road regulation, they are not always correctly labeled. Therefore, we developed a novel method for the detection of road abnormalities (i.e., speed bumps). This method makes use of a gyro, an accelerometer, and a GPS sensor mounted in a car. After having the vehicle cruise through several streets, data is retrieved from the sensors. Then, using a cross-validation strategy, a genetic algorithm is used to find a logistic model that accurately detects road abnormalities. The proposed model had an accuracy of 0.9714 in a blind evaluation, with a false positive rate smaller than 0.018, and an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.9784. This methodology has the potential to detect speed bumps in quasi real-time conditions, and can be used to construct a real-time surface monitoring system.
Research on the microbiome has drawn an increasing amount of attention over the past decade. Even more so for its association with disease. Neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) have been a subject of study for a long time with slow success in improving diagnostic accuracy or identifying a possibility for treatment. In this work, we analyze past and current research on microbiome and its positive impact on AD treatment and diagnosis. We present a bibliometric analysis from 2012 to 2021 with data retrieved on September 2, 2021, from the Scopus database. The query includes “Gut AND (Microbiota OR Microbiome) AND Alzheimer*” within the article title, abstract, and keywords for all kinds of documents in the database. Compared with 2016, the number of publications (NPs) on the subject doubled by 2017. Moreover, we observe an exponential growth through 2020, and with the data presented, it is almost certain that it will continue this trend and grow even further in the upcoming years. We identify key journals interested in the subject and discuss the articles with most citations, analyzing trends and topics for future research, such as the ability to diagnose the disease and complement the cognitive test with other clinical biomarkers. According to the test, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is normally considered an initial stage for AD. This test, combined with the role of the gut microbiome in early stages of the disease, may improve the diagnostic accuracy. Based on our findings, there is emerging evidence that microbiota, perhaps more specifically gut microbiota, plays a key role in the pathogenesis of diseases, such as AD.
Abstract. Early diagnoses of Alzheimer's disease (AD) would confer many benefits. Several biomarkers have been proposed to achieve such a task, where features extracted from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have played an important role. However, studies have focused exclusively on morphological characteristics. This study aims to determine whether features relating to the signal and texture of the image could predict mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to AD progression. Clinical, biological, and positron emission tomography information and MRI images of 62 subjects from the AD neuroimaging initiative were used in this study, extracting 4150 features from each MRI. Within this multimodal database, a feature selection algorithm was used to obtain an accurate and small logistic regression model, generated by a methodology that yielded a mean blind test accuracy of 0.79. This model included six features, five of them obtained from the MRI images, and one obtained from genotyping. A risk analysis divided the subjects into low-risk and high-risk groups according to a prognostic index. The groups were statistically different (p-value ¼ 2.04e −11 ). These results demonstrated that MRI features related to both signal and texture add MCI to AD predictive power, and supported the ongoing notion that multimodal biomarkers outperform single-modality ones.
The early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is very important for treatment research and patient care purposes. Few biomarkers are currently considered in clinical settings, and their use is still optional. The objective of this work was to determine whether multimodal and nonpreviously AD associated features could improve the classification accuracy between AD, MCI, and healthy controls, which may impact future AD biomarkers. For this, Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database was mined for case-control candidates. At least 652 baseline features extracted from MRI and PET analyses, biological samples, and clinical data up to February 2014 were used. A feature selection methodology that includes a genetic algorithm search coupled to a logistic regression classifier and forward and backward selection strategies was used to explore combinations of features. This generated diagnostic models with sizes ranging from 3 to 8, including well documented AD biomarkers, as well as unexplored image, biochemical, and clinical features. Accuracies of 0.85, 0.79, and 0.80 were achieved for HC-AD, HC-MCI, and MCI-AD classifications, respectively, when evaluated using a blind test set. In conclusion, a set of features provided additional and independent information to well-established AD biomarkers, aiding in the classification of MCI and AD.
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