Genetic information for chronic disease prediction

Michael A. Grasso, MD, PhD
University of Maryland School of Medicine

1:00pm Friday 23 September 2011, 227 ITE

Type 2 diabetes and coronary artery disease are commonly occurring polygenic-multifactorial diseases, which are responsible for significant morbidity and mortality. The identification of people at risk for these conditions has historically been based on clinical factors alone. However, this resulted in prediction algorithms that are linked to symptomatic states, which have limited accuracy in asymptomatic individuals. Advances in genetics have raised the hope that genetic testing may aid in disease prediction, treatment, and prevention. Although intuitive, the addition of genetic information to increase the accuracy of disease prediction remains an unproven hypothesis. We present an overview of genetic issues involved in polygenic-multifactorial diseases, and summarize ongoing efforts use this information for disease prediction.

Michael Grasso is an Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Emergency Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and an Assistant Research Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He earned a medical degree from the George Washington University and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. He is a member of the Upsilon Pi Epsilon Honor Society in the Computing Sciences, the Kane-King-Dodec Medical Honor Society, and the William Beaumont Medical Research Honor Society. He completed a residency at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and currently works in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Maryland Medical Center. He has been awarded more than $1,200,000 in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Bureau of Standards and Technology, and the Department of Defense, and has authored more than 35 scholarly papers and abstracts. His research interests include clinical decision support systems, clinical data mining, clinical image processing, personalized medicine, software engineering, database engineering, and human factors. He is also a semi-professional trumpet player and is interested in the specific medical needs of performing artists, especially instrumental musicians.

Host: Yelena Yesha

2 Peter 1:3-10 (NIV)

³His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. ⁴Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.

⁵For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; ⁶and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; ⁷and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. ⁸For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. ⁹But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins.

¹⁰Therefore, my brothers and sisters, make every effort to confirm your calling and election. For if you do these things, you will never stumble,

Reflection

No doubt about it, growing up in the calling is hard work. Twice we read here about making ‘every effort’ along with a long list of qualities that we are to excel in. Living and growing in this calling is not something that just happens, something we do casually or even are passive about. But if we skip right to the list we miss out on the how and why. We might find ourselves just taking part in religious routines without any real power to grow. The passage, however, makes clear that power is Christ’s and that He gives us everything we need to live and grow. Empty routine becomes active participation in what Christ is doing in our lives and our communities. A people called are not so just by name, but by every living expression, reflecting the One who calls and empowers us.

Responding to the Transmission

We need real power to live and excel in the calling. The good news is that Christ has already given us everything we need. He calls and He empowers us to bring this calling to full expression in us. If there are things we do that have become dry routines, forgetting why we do them, or as we see qualities of our character that are not increasing in expression like Christ, let’s come to Christ with those areas. Let’s receive again why and how we live and grow. Let’s also pray for our communities that, empowered by the Spirit, we would continue to grow up into living this way together…for the sake of each other and for others to know God’s grace.

Courtesy of Forest Ethics

We are stuck in a sticky oil slick.

Get comfortable… because it is not likely we are going to escape from the mess anytime soon.

While alternative sources of energy (wind, solar etc) are explored, our addiction to fossil fuels will continue unabated.

To feed our needs, energy companies are constantly looking for new sources of the mucky stuff.

They have found a tempting new prospect in nearby Canada. This could be a massive boost to American energy prospects… and a gigantic sludgy mess.

The location is the tar sands located near Alberta, Canada. Also known as oil sands, this is a very dark dirty earthy mix from which a variety of chemicals and fuels can be extracted.

But there is a hitch…the processing of the tar has a host of production and environmental hazards.

Still, after the the terrible recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, some folks consider a land based fuel source a safer bet.

Now there is news of a pipeline from Canada to Texas (where the sludge would be refined).

This is stirring a ton of controversy with protests in Washington resulting in a record number of arrests.

There is also opposition from a group with a fair amount of political power in Canada— the indigenous tribes.

Native Canadians and Americans have partnered to stop this pipeline to preserve the Boreal Forest near its construction.

President Obama (not Congress) has the final say on the pipeline. Advocates are promoting the prospects of new jobs the project might create (a plus in this bad economy).

We should hear soon.

With concern about America’s addiction to fossil fuels, this debate, like global warming will continue to heat up.

Image from The Washington Post

We’re days away from the 10-year anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001.

As we approach the mark, it’s hard for many of us to remember life before the tragedy.

For the last decade, much of our political discourse has been engulfed by the War on Terror, comprised of two overseas operations, both with debatable impacts.

On the home front, the new thinking has altered long-held views about the effectiveness of military power and the likelihood that peace will ever prevail.”

Terms like IED, jihadist, and extremist have become a part of our discussions. And, extensive security procedures are the norm when traveling.

While these are obvious changes to the way we lived, there’s another part of life that has been forgotten.

The political unity that directly followed the attacks  is one of the most distant memories. Now, the country seems more divided than ever over issues like the economy and job creation.

Are we doing those who lost their lives a disservice through partisan politics?

Thanks to CNN!

We hope you enjoyed your vacation, now fix the country. Congress is back to “work.”

Speaking of disappointing performances…President Obama’s ratings hit a new low.

Texas on fire, again. Wildfire tearing through the drought-struck state.

Feeling queasy? There might be a solution!

And, in theaters this fall…

Commercials will tell you to blame your cell phone carrier for problems with reception. They’re partly right, though location also plays a role — a Metro train might not be the best place for a heart-to-heart with a loved one.

But a seldom acknowledged source of bad reception comes from a basic challenge of signal processing. Cell phones convert data from two distinct channels of radio waves into information that can be used and understood. The same signal processing challenge applies for a wide range of devices used in communications, medicine and other fields.

For decades, engineers made various assumptions to simplify the data so they could design devices efficiently. They traded clarity for speed, reducing costs but also leaving us with garbled phone calls and reduced precision for some medical tests.

Now researchers at UMBC are receiving wide recognition for describing a mathematical technique that allows researchers to avoid this tradeoff.

“People have been making simplifying assumptions that don’t make good use of the data,” explains Tülay Adali, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering. “With the framework we developed, researchers don’t have to do that.”

The technique is not technically new. The researcher D.H. Brandwood described similar ideas in a 1983 paper. But Adali describes a “lightbulb” moment in 2006 when she was discussing that paper with Hualiang Li ’08, Ph.D., electrical engineering, who has since become a research assistant professor at UMBC.

The two researchers realized the technique could be applied broadly to process a range of data without having to simplify those assumptions.

“People had missed that one elegant, simple point,” Adali says.

Subsequent research at UMBC linked the technique to work published in the early 20th century by the Austrian mathematician Wilhelm Wirtinger. Adali and Li, along with Mike Novey ’09, Ph.D., computer science, and French researcher Jean-Francois Cardoso, described the technique and developed a framework for applying it to a range of problems in “Complex ICA Using Nonlinear Functions,” a paper published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing in 2008.

The four researchers were honored in May with the 2010 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award, presented in Prague at the 2011 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. Given annually, the award recognizes up to six recent papers with significant impact on the field.

While cell phone reception problems frustrate many consumers on a daily basis, the same challenges present themselves in satellite communications, acoustics, radar, medical imaging and other fields. Adali’s research now focuses on an analysis of medical data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other sources. Researchers often use fMRI to see what is happening in subjects’ brains while they are at rest or performing tasks such as driving or solving problems.

Applying Wirtinger’s techniques to analyze fMRI data, Adali and her colleagues have shown, on average, a 20 percent improvement in sensitivity detecting brain activity. The technique also does a better job highlighting which brain regions are involved in certain tasks, providing insights that can be used to more accurately diagnose mental disorders.

It’s a discovery that translates into shorter, more accurate tests and, for the broad field of signal processing, a more effective and efficient way to use data.

— Anthony Lane

Manil Suri, professor of mathematics, will serve on two panels at the Centre Pompidou library in Paris as part of an event with Indian authors. Suri’s most recent book is “The Age of Shiva.” Suri also teaches in the Asian studies program.