Informatics (Oct 2018)
Large Scale Advanced Data Analytics on Skin Conditions from Genotype to Phenotype
Abstract
A crucial factor in Big Data is to take advantage of available data and use that for new discovery or hypothesis generation. In this study, we analyzed Large-scale data from the literature to OMICS, such as the genome, proteome or metabolome, respectively, for skin conditions. Skin acts as a natural barrier to the world around us and protects our body from different conditions, viruses, and bacteria, and plays a big part in appearance. We have included Hyperpigmentation, Postinflammatory Hyperpigmentation, Melasma, Rosacea, Actinic keratosis, and Pigmentation in this study. These conditions have been selected based on reasoning of big scale UCSF patient data of 527,273 females from 2011 to 2017, and related publications from 2000 to 2017 regarding skin conditions. The selected conditions have been confirmed with experts in the field from different research centers and hospitals. We proposed a novel framework for large-scale available public data to find the common genotypes and phenotypes of different skin conditions. The outcome of this study based on Advance Data Analytics provides information on skin conditions and their treatments to the research community and introduces new hypotheses for possible genotype and phenotype targets. The novelty of this work is a meta-analysis of different features on different skin conditions. Instead of looking at individual conditions with one or two features, which is how most of the previous works are conducted, we looked at several conditions with different features to find the common factors between them. Our hypothesis is that by finding the overlap in genotype and phenotype between different skin conditions, we can suggest using a drug that is recommended in one condition, for treatment in the other condition which has similar genes or other common phenotypes. We identified common genes between these skin conditions and were able to find common areas for targeting between conditions, such as common drugs. Our work has implications for discovery and new hypotheses to improve health quality, and is geared towards making Big Data useful.
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