comoR: a software for disease comorbidity risk assessment.

Abstract

Background: The diagnosis of comorbidities, which refers to the coexistence of different acute and chronic diseases, is difficult due to the modern extreme specialisation of physicians. We envisage that a software dedicated to comorbidity diagnosis could result in an effective aid to the health practice.

Results: We have developed an R software comoR to compute novel estimators of the disease comorbidity associations. Starting from an initial diagnosis, genetic and clinical data of a patient the software identifies the risk of disease comorbidity. Then it provides a pipeline with different causal inference packages (e.g. pcalg, qtlnet etc) to predict the causal relationship of diseases. It also provides a pipeline with network regression and survival analysis tools (e.g. Net-Cox, rbsurv etc) to predict more accurate survival probability of patients. The input of this software is the initial diagnosis for a patient and the output provides evidences of disease comorbidity mapping.

Conclusions: The functions of the comoR offer flexibility for diagnostic applications to predict disease comorbidities, and can be easily integrated to high-throughput and clinical data analysis pipelines.