TY - JOUR

T1 - Graph4Med

T2 - a web application and a graph database for visualizing and analyzing medical databases

AU - Schäfer, Jero

AU - Tang, Ming

AU - Luu, Danny

AU - Bergmann, Anke Katharina

AU - Wiese, Lena

N1 - Funding Information: We acknowledge publication support by the OAF of the University Library of Goethe University Frankfurt. Project name: Graph4Med. Project home page: http://graph4med.cs.uni-frankfurt.de. Project repository: https://github.com/jeschaef/Graph4Med. Operating system(s): Platform independent. Programming language: Python, JavaScript. Other requirements: Neo4j, NeoDash, Browser. LICENSE: MIT. Restrictions for non-academics: None. Funding Information: Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. This work was supported by Else Kröner-Fresenius-Stiftung (Promotionsprogramm DigiStrucMed 2020_EKPK.20) and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Germany, under the project LeibnizKILabor (grant no. 01DD20003). No funding body played any roles in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and in writing the manuscript.

PY - 2022/12/12

Y1 - 2022/12/12

N2 - Background: Medical databases normally contain large amounts of data in a variety of forms. Although they grant significant insights into diagnosis and treatment, implementing data exploration into current medical databases is challenging since these are often based on a relational schema and cannot be used to easily extract information for cohort analysis and visualization. As a consequence, valuable information regarding cohort distribution or patient similarity may be missed. With the rapid advancement of biomedical technologies, new forms of data from methods such as Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) or chromosome microarray (array CGH) are constantly being generated; hence it can be expected that the amount and complexity of medical data will rise and bring relational database systems to a limit. Description: We present Graph4Med, a web application that relies on a graph database obtained by transforming a relational database. Graph4Med provides a straightforward visualization and analysis of a selected patient cohort. Our use case is a database of pediatric Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL). Along routine patients’ health records it also contains results of latest technologies such as NGS data. We developed a suitable graph data schema to convert the relational data into a graph data structure and store it in Neo4j. We used NeoDash to build a dashboard for querying and displaying patients’ cohort analysis. This way our tool (1) quickly displays the overview of patients’ cohort information such as distributions of gender, age, mutations (fusions), diagnosis; (2) provides mutation (fusion) based similarity search and display in a maneuverable graph; (3) generates an interactive graph of any selected patient and facilitates the identification of interesting patterns among patients. Conclusion: We demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of a graph database for storing and querying medical databases. Our dashboard allows a fast and interactive analysis and visualization of complex medical data. It is especially useful for patients similarity search based on mutations (fusions), of which vast amounts of data have been generated by NGS in recent years. It can discover relationships and patterns in patients cohorts that are normally hard to grasp. Expanding Graph4Med to more medical databases will bring novel insights into diagnostic and research.

AB - Background: Medical databases normally contain large amounts of data in a variety of forms. Although they grant significant insights into diagnosis and treatment, implementing data exploration into current medical databases is challenging since these are often based on a relational schema and cannot be used to easily extract information for cohort analysis and visualization. As a consequence, valuable information regarding cohort distribution or patient similarity may be missed. With the rapid advancement of biomedical technologies, new forms of data from methods such as Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) or chromosome microarray (array CGH) are constantly being generated; hence it can be expected that the amount and complexity of medical data will rise and bring relational database systems to a limit. Description: We present Graph4Med, a web application that relies on a graph database obtained by transforming a relational database. Graph4Med provides a straightforward visualization and analysis of a selected patient cohort. Our use case is a database of pediatric Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL). Along routine patients’ health records it also contains results of latest technologies such as NGS data. We developed a suitable graph data schema to convert the relational data into a graph data structure and store it in Neo4j. We used NeoDash to build a dashboard for querying and displaying patients’ cohort analysis. This way our tool (1) quickly displays the overview of patients’ cohort information such as distributions of gender, age, mutations (fusions), diagnosis; (2) provides mutation (fusion) based similarity search and display in a maneuverable graph; (3) generates an interactive graph of any selected patient and facilitates the identification of interesting patterns among patients. Conclusion: We demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of a graph database for storing and querying medical databases. Our dashboard allows a fast and interactive analysis and visualization of complex medical data. It is especially useful for patients similarity search based on mutations (fusions), of which vast amounts of data have been generated by NGS in recent years. It can discover relationships and patterns in patients cohorts that are normally hard to grasp. Expanding Graph4Med to more medical databases will bring novel insights into diagnostic and research.

KW - Data exploration

KW - Graph database

KW - Medical database

KW - Visualization

KW - Web application

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85143799112&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1186/s12859-022-05092-0

DO - 10.1186/s12859-022-05092-0

M3 - Article

C2 - 36503436

AN - SCOPUS:85143799112

VL - 23

JO - BMC BIOINFORMATICS

JF - BMC BIOINFORMATICS

SN - 1471-2105

M1 - 537

ER -