Associating Genomics and Clinical Information by Means of Semantic Based Ranking

Relating genomic data with clinical and disease information is a new challenge for life sciences research. High performance computational platforms allow huge quantity of biological data production with new technologies (e.g. Next Generation Sequencing techniques). Nowadays, genomic ontologies describing genes and functions, as well as databases containing diseases groups, are available. We focus on the problem of enriching genomic datasets containing miRNA genes by adding related disease information. The enrichment is performed by using ontologies to find genes-to-diseases associations. Ontologies are used to describe molecular genomic processes and functions, as well as disease classes and experimental details. International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is used for the classification of diseases and clinical information. Diseases are ranked by using a Google Page Rank based algorithm. An application tool called Surf App! has been coded and developed in R and tested on a neurological disease dataset.