Editorial Translational Biomedical Informatics and ...downloads.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2013/237465.pdf · Translational biomedical informatics is rapidly emerging as a new discipline

Hindawi Publishing CorporationBioMed Research InternationalVolume 2013, Article ID 237465, 2 pageshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/237465

EditorialTranslational Biomedical Informatics and ComputationalSystems Medicine

Zhongming Zhao,1,2,3,4 Bairong Shen,5 Xinghua Lu,6 and Wanwipa Vongsangnak5

1 Department of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, TN 37203, USA2Center for Quantitative Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN 37232, USA3Department of Psychiatry, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, TN 37212, USA4Department of Cancer Biology, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, TN 37232, USA5 Center for Systems Biology, Soochow University, Suzhou, Jiangsu 215006, China6Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15206, USA

Correspondence should be addressed to Zhongming Zhao; [email protected]

Received 7 November 2013; Accepted 7 November 2013

Copyright © 2013 Zhongming Zhao et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons AttributionLicense, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properlycited.

Translational biomedical informatics is rapidly emergingas a new discipline to meet translational medical researchdemands. This discipline integrates a variety of data frommedical research, biological research, and electronic medicalrecords. Computational systems medicine applies compu-tational and systems biology approaches to solve complexproblems inmedical research; this approach aims for a deeperunderstanding of disease pathophysiology and a systems levelview of disease development. Systems medicine approachesassist investigators with better biomarker discovery and, thus,improve the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of complexdiseases. Research activities in these areas have rapidlyexpanded, largely due to the huge volume of data generatedfrom high throughput technologies such as next-generationsequencing (NGS), availability and better management of themassive amount of clinical data, and the demand to effectivelylink biological and genetic data to clinical records. One exam-ple is the B2B program, which includes two iterative compo-nents: bench-to-bedside, such that the basic research findingscan be translated to clinical practice, and bedside-to-bench,such that the refinements to clinical practice offer new clinicalinsights and samples for experimental investigation. Thesecomplimentary components further enhance translationalapplications. Among the activities of translational biomedicalresearch and clinical practice, computational approaches,including data curation and management, algorithm and

model development, multidimensional data integration, datavisualization, and high performance computing, providefundamental support.

We launched this special issue to address the demand fortranslational biomedical informatics and discuss the currentadvances in this field. We are interested in both new theoriesand tools in this area as well as their applications in transla-tional research.We specifically encouraged the submission ofwork in areas such as “-omics” data integration and analysisin complex diseases, NGS data analysis and application inmedicine, systems biology related research in biomedicine,biomedical data mining and database management, systemlevel modeling and simulation of complex diseases, andvisualization of complex data in medicine. Correspondingly,after a rigorous peer review, six papers were selected from the12 submissions. We briefly describe these papers as follows.

In “Translational bioinformatics for diagnostic and prog-nostic prediction of prostate cancer in the next-generationsequencing era,” J. Chen et al. discussed the current tech-nological advances in molecular biomarker discovery andtheir translation into the clinical realm for prostate cancerdiagnosis and prognosis. The authors reviewed the advancesand challenges in the discovery of molecular markers fordiagnosis and prognosis of prostate cancer based on highthroughput technologies, including microarray and NGS.The authors highlighted 24 prostate cancer NGS studies and

2 BioMed Research International

discussed prostate cancer biomarkers at the pathway level.Finally, they provided future direction and perspectives ontranslational research in prostate cancer.

In “Exploring the cooccurrence patterns of multiple setsof genomic intervals,” H. Wu and Z. S. Qin presented anovel statistical method and software tool to characterize thecooccurrence patterns of multiple sets of genomic intervalsfound in high throughput data such as ChIP-seq. Specifically,they applied a finitemixturemodel tomeasure co-occurrencepatterns and demonstrated the model’s accuracy using sim-ulation and real data. The method is useful to detect co-occurrence patterns in genomic interval-based large datasets.

In “Diagnosis value of the serum amyloid A test in neonatalsepsis: a meta-analysis,” H. Yuan et al. performed a meta-analysis of the serum amyloid A (SAA) test as a diagnosticmarker for neonatal sepsis. Neonatal sepsis is a commonhuman disorder. It is caused by a bacterial blood streaminfection in a newborn baby, which produces a high fever.Through a meta-analysis of studies retrieved from PubMed,EMBASE, the Cochrane Library, and the Google Networkbetween January 1996 and June 2013, the authors found amoderate accuracy of a SAA test in the diagnosis of neonatalsepsis, suggesting that SAA might be promising for thediagnosis of neonatal sepsis.

In “Characterization of schizophrenia adverse drug inter-actions through a network approach and drug classifica-tion,” J. Sun et al. first constructed a schizophrenia-specificadverse drug interaction network and then characterizedthe schizophrenia and adverse drug interactions using theAnatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) classification sys-tem. The authors found that schizophrenia drugs tend tohave more adverse drug interactions than other drugs. Theyfurther revealed the distinct biological features of schizophre-nia typical and atypical drugs. This work is the first tocharacterize the adverse drug interactions in the course ofschizophrenia treatment.

In “CADe system integrated within the electronic healthrecord,” N. Vallez et al. implemented an electronic healthrecord (EHR) combined with a computer aided detection(CADe) system for breast cancer diagnosis, aiming to provideradiologists with a comprehensive working environment thatfacilitates the integration, image visualization, and use ofaided tools within the EHR. The CADe system allows a userto display, edit, and report results in standardized formats notonly for the patient information but also for their medicalimages. More features will be added in future work.

In “NCBI2RDF: enabling full RDF-based access to NCBIdatabases,” A. Anguita et al. introduced the NCBI2RDFsystem that provides users with RDF-based access to thecomplete NCBI data repository. RDF is a standard modelfor data interchange on the Web and was created by theW3C consortium and accepted as a standard in 2004. TheNCBI2RDF, which has two steps (metadata generation andquery resolution), enables a user to obtain integrated accessto comprehensive data within other existing RDF-basedrepositories, overcoming current limitations on NCBI datasearch by implementing its Entrez system.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose criticalreview helped improve the quality of the papers in this specialissue. We would like to acknowledge the organizers andcommittee members of The First International Conferenceon Translational Biomedical Informatics (ICTBI 2012, heldon December 8–10, 2012) for their efforts to provide aforum to discuss translational biomedical informatics andcomputational systems medicine, through which this specialissue was made possible.

Zhongming ZhaoBairong ShenXinghua Lu

Wanwipa Vongsangnak

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Editorial Translational Biomedical Informatics and ...downloads.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2013/237465.pdf · Translational biomedical informatics is rapidly emerging as a new discipline