Biomedical subjects

Robert Küffner

Publications and source records attributed to Robert Küffner.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

RelEx--relation extraction using dependency parse trees.

MOTIVATION: The discovery of regulatory pathways, signal cascades, metabolic processes or disease models requires knowledge on individual relations like e.g. physical or regulatory interactions between genes and proteins. Most interactions mentioned in the free text of biomedical publications are not yet contained in structured databases. RESULTS: We developed RelEx, an approach for relation extraction from free text. It is based on natural language preprocessing producing dependency parse trees and applying a small number of simple rules to these trees. We applied RelEx on a comprehensive set of one million MEDLINE abstracts dealing with gene and protein relations and extracted approximately 150,000 relations with an estimated performance of both 80% precision and 80% recall. AVAILABILITY: The used natural language preprocessing tools are free for use for academic research. Test sets and relation term lists are available from our website (http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/publications/RelEx/).

Algorithms↗

PubMed2006

Reliable gene signatures for microarray classification: assessment of stability and performance.

MOTIVATION: Two important questions for the analysis of gene expression measurements from different sample classes are (1) how to classify samples and (2) how to identify meaningful gene signatures (ranked gene lists) exhibiting the differences between classes and sample subsets. Solutions to both questions have immediate biological and biomedical applications. To achieve optimal classification performance, a suitable combination of classifier and gene selection method needs to be specifically selected for a given dataset. The selected gene signatures can be unstable and the resulting classification accuracy unreliable, particularly when considering different subsets of samples. Both unstable gene signatures and overestimated classification accuracy can impair biological conclusions. METHODS: We address these two issues by repeatedly evaluating the classification performance of all models, i.e. pairwise combinations of various gene selection and classification methods, for random subsets of arrays (sampling). A model score is used to select the most appropriate model for the given dataset. Consensus gene signatures are constructed by extracting those genes frequently selected over many samplings. Sampling additionally permits measurement of the stability of the classification performance for each model, which serves as a measure of model reliability. RESULTS: We analyzed a large gene expression dataset with 78 measurements of four different cartilage sample classes. Classifiers trained on subsets of measurements frequently produce models with highly variable performance. Our approach provides reliable classification performance estimates via sampling. In addition to reliable classification performance, we determined stable consensus signatures (i.e. gene lists) for sample classes. Manual literature screening showed that these genes are highly relevant to our gene expression experiment with osteoarthritic cartilage. We compared our approach to others based on a publicly available dataset on breast cancer. AVAILABILITY: R package at http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~davis/edaprakt

Algorithms↗

PubMed2005

Expert knowledge without the expert: integrated analysis of gene expression and literature to derive active functional contexts.

MOTIVATION: The interpretation of expression data without appropriate expert knowledge is difficult and usually limited to exploratory data analysis, such as clustering and detecting differentially regulated genes. However, comparing experimental results against manually compiled knowledge resources might limit or bias the perspective on the data. Thus, manual analysis by experts is required to obtain confident predictions about involved processes. RESULTS: We present an algorithm to simultaneously derive interpretations of expression measurements together with biological hypotheses from biomedical publications. It identifies active functional contexts ('concepts'), i.e. gene clusters that exhibit both a significant gene expression as well as a coherent literature profile. Manual intervention by an expert in specifying prior knowledge is not required. The approach scales to realistic applications and does not rely on controlled vocabularies or pathway resources. We validated our algorithm by analyzing a current juvenile arthritis dataset. A number of gene clusters and accompanying literature topics are identified as an interpretation of the data that coincide well with the phenotype and biological processes known to be involved in the disease. We demonstrate that generated clusters are both more sensitive and more specific than Gene Ontology categories detected on the same data. The method allows for in-depth investigation of subsets of genes, the associated literature topics and publications. AVAILABILITY: Supplementary data on clusters is available upon request.

Expert Systems↗