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Biomedical subjects

Qinghua Cui

Publications and source records attributed to Qinghua Cui.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

MedImg: An Integrated Database for Public Medical Images.

The advancements in deep learning algorithms for medical image analysis have garnered significant attention in recent years. While several studies have shown promising results, with models achieving or even surpassing human performance, translating these advancements into clinical practice is still accompanied by various challenges. A primary obstacle lies in the availability of large-scale, well-characterized datasets for validating the generalization of approaches. To address this challenge, we curated a diverse collection of medical image datasets from multiple public sources, containing 105 datasets and a total of 1,995,671 images. These images span 14 modalities, including X-ray, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, optical coherence tomography, ultrasound, and endoscopy, and originate from 13 organs, such as the lung, brain, eye, and heart. Subsequently, we constructed an online database, MedImg, which incorporates and systematically organizes these medical images to facilitate data accessibility. MedImg serves as an intuitive and open-access platform for facilitating research in deep learning-based medical image analysis, accessible at https://www.cuilab.cn/medimg/.

Humans↗

MicroRNAs preferentially target the genes with high transcriptional regulation complexity.

Over the past few years, microRNAs (miRNAs) have emerged as a new prominent class of gene regulatory factors that negatively regulate expression of approximately one-third of the genes in animal genomes at post-transcriptional level. However, it is still unclear why some genes are regulated by miRNAs but others are not, i.e. what principles govern miRNA regulation in animal genomes. In this study, we systematically analyzed the relationship between transcription factors (TFs) and miRNAs in gene regulation. We found that the genes with more TF-binding sites have a higher probability of being targeted by miRNAs and have more miRNA-binding sites on average. This observation reveals that the genes with higher cis-regulation complexity are more coordinately regulated by TFs at the transcriptional level and by miRNAs at the post-transcriptional level. This is a potentially novel discovery of mechanism for coordinated regulation of gene expression. Gene ontology analysis further demonstrated that such coordinated regulation is more popular in the developmental genes.

Chromosome Mapping↗

Principles of microRNA regulation of a human cellular signaling network.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are endogenous approximately 22-nucleotide RNAs, which suppress gene expression by selectively binding to the 3'-noncoding region of specific messenger RNAs through base-pairing. Given the diversity and abundance of miRNA targets, miRNAs appear to functionally interact with various components of many cellular networks. By analyzing the interactions between miRNAs and a human cellular signaling network, we found that miRNAs predominantly target positive regulatory motifs, highly connected scaffolds and most downstream network components such as signaling transcription factors, but less frequently target negative regulatory motifs, common components of basic cellular machines and most upstream network components such as ligands. In addition, when an adaptor has potential to recruit more downstream components, these components are more frequently targeted by miRNAs. This work uncovers the principles of miRNA regulation of signal transduction networks and implies a potential function of miRNAs for facilitating robust transitions of cellular response to extracellular signals and maintaining cellular homeostasis.

Computational Biology↗

Characterizing the dynamic connectivity between genes by variable parameter regression and Kalman filtering based on temporal gene expression data.

MOTIVATION: One popular method for analyzing functional connectivity between genes is to cluster genes with similar expression profiles. The most popular metrics measuring the similarity (or dissimilarity) among genes include Pearson's correlation, linear regression coefficient and Euclidean distance. As these metrics only give some constant values, they can only depict a stationary connectivity between genes. However, the functional connectivity between genes usually changes with time. Here, we introduce a novel insight for characterizing the relationship between genes and find out a proper mathematical model, variable parameter regression and Kalman filtering to model it. RESULTS: We applied our algorithm to some simulated data and two pairs of real gene expression data. The changes of connectivity in simulated data are closely identical with the truth and the results of two pairs of gene expression data show that our method has successfully demonstrated the dynamic connectivity between genes. CONTACT: jiangtz@nlpr.ia.ac.cn.

Computer Simulation↗

A combinational feature selection and ensemble neural network method for classification of gene expression data.

BACKGROUND: Microarray experiments are becoming a powerful tool for clinical diagnosis, as they have the potential to discover gene expression patterns that are characteristic for a particular disease. To date, this problem has received most attention in the context of cancer research, especially in tumor classification. Various feature selection methods and classifier design strategies also have been generally used and compared. However, most published articles on tumor classification have applied a certain technique to a certain dataset, and recently several researchers compared these techniques based on several public datasets. But, it has been verified that differently selected features reflect different aspects of the dataset and some selected features can obtain better solutions on some certain problems. At the same time, faced with a large amount of microarray data with little knowledge, it is difficult to find the intrinsic characteristics using traditional methods. In this paper, we attempt to introduce a combinational feature selection method in conjunction with ensemble neural networks to generally improve the accuracy and robustness of sample classification. RESULTS: We validate our new method on several recent publicly available datasets both with predictive accuracy of testing samples and through cross validation. Compared with the best performance of other current methods, remarkably improved results can be obtained using our new strategy on a wide range of different datasets. CONCLUSIONS: Thus, we conclude that our methods can obtain more information in microarray data to get more accurate classification and also can help to extract the latent marker genes of the diseases for better diagnosis and treatment.

Acute Disease↗

Esub8: a novel tool to predict protein subcellular localizations in eukaryotic organisms.

BACKGROUND: Subcellular localization of a new protein sequence is very important and fruitful for understanding its function. As the number of new genomes has dramatically increased over recent years, a reliable and efficient system to predict protein subcellular location is urgently needed. RESULTS: Esub8 was developed to predict protein subcellular localizations for eukaryotic proteins based on amino acid composition. In this research, the proteins are classified into the following eight groups: chloroplast, cytoplasm, extracellular, Golgi apparatus, lysosome, mitochondria, nucleus and peroxisome. We know subcellular localization is a typical classification problem; consequently, a one-against-one (1-v-1) multi-class support vector machine was introduced to construct the classifier. Unlike previous methods, ours considers the order information of protein sequences by a different method. Our method is tested in three subcellular localization predictions for prokaryotic proteins and four subcellular localization predictions for eukaryotic proteins on Reinhardt's dataset. The results are then compared to several other methods. The total prediction accuracies of two tests are both 100% by a self-consistency test, and are 92.9% and 84.14% by the jackknife test, respectively. Esub8 also provides excellent results: the total prediction accuracies are 100% by a self-consistency test and 87% by the jackknife test. CONCLUSIONS: Our method represents a different approach for predicting protein subcellular localization and achieved a satisfactory result; furthermore, we believe Esub8 will be a useful tool for predicting protein subcellular localizations in eukaryotic organisms.

Computational Biology↗