Date: June 29 2023 @ 9:30 ET
Venue: Zoom
Speaker: Dr. Alexia Giannoula
Affiliation: Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Title: Systems-medicine temporal analysis of patient disease trajectories
Abstract: Incorporating the temporal dimension into disease comorbidity studies has shown to be crucial for achieving a better understanding of the disease progression. Furthermore, due to the multifactorial nature of human disease, exploring disease associations from different perspectives can provide a global view of the underlying mechanisms and thus, shed more light on their aetiology. In this seminar, a temporal systems-medicine approach will be presented for identifying time-dependent multimorbidity patterns from patient disease trajectories, by integrating data from electronic health records (EHRs) with genetic and phenotypic information. Specifically, the disease trajectories are clustered using an unsupervised algorithm based on dynamic time warping (DTW) and three disease similarity metrics: clinical, genetic and phenotypic. The proposed methodology can be applied to any longitudinal cohort and disease of interest. Prostate cancer is, herein, selected as a use case of medical interest to demonstrate, for the first time, the identification of temporal disease associations in different disease spaces.