Publications by authors named "Ben Coleman"

Article Synopsis
  • The GA4GH Phenopacket Schema, released in 2022 and approved as a standard by ISO, allows the sharing of clinical and genomic data, including phenotypic descriptions and genetic information, to aid in genomic diagnostics.
  • Phenopacket Store Version 0.1.19 offers a collection of 6668 phenopackets linked to various diseases and genes, making it a crucial resource for testing algorithms and software in genomic research.
  • This collection represents the first extensive case-level, standardized phenotypic information sourced from medical literature, supporting advancements in diagnostic genomics and machine learning applications.
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Acute COVID-19 infection can be followed by diverse clinical manifestations referred to as Post Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV2 Infection (PASC). Studies have shown an increased risk of being diagnosed with new-onset psychiatric disease following a diagnosis of acute COVID-19. However, it was unclear whether non-psychiatric PASC-associated manifestations (PASC-AMs) are associated with an increased risk of new-onset psychiatric disease following COVID-19.

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Motivation: Graph representation learning is a family of related approaches that learn low-dimensional vector representations of nodes and other graph elements called embeddings. Embeddings approximate characteristics of the graph and can be used for a variety of machine-learning tasks such as novel edge prediction. For many biomedical applications, partial knowledge exists about positive edges that represent relationships between pairs of entities, but little to no knowledge is available about negative edges that represent the explicit lack of a relationship between two nodes.

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The Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) is a widely used resource that comprehensively organizes and defines the phenotypic features of human disease, enabling computational inference and supporting genomic and phenotypic analyses through semantic similarity and machine learning algorithms. The HPO has widespread applications in clinical diagnostics and translational research, including genomic diagnostics, gene-disease discovery, and cohort analytics. In recent years, groups around the world have developed translations of the HPO from English to other languages, and the HPO browser has been internationalized, allowing users to view HPO term labels and in many cases synonyms and definitions in ten languages in addition to English.

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Article Synopsis
  • Common data models standardize electronic health record (EHR) data but struggle to fully integrate the necessary resources for deep phenotyping.
  • The OMOP2OBO algorithm automates the mapping of Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) vocabularies to Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) ontologies, significantly reducing the need for manual curation.
  • With OMOP2OBO, mappings for a large number of conditions, drugs, and measurements were created, facilitating the identification of undiagnosed patients in rare diseases and enhancing opportunities for EHR-based deep phenotyping.
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Article Synopsis
  • Healthcare datasets from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are valuable for studying patient outcomes, but often have missing data that can lead to bias if not handled properly.* -
  • Multiple imputation algorithms aim to fill in missing values, but there's no clear consensus on the best one, and selecting parameters for these algorithms can be challenging.* -
  • This paper presents a new framework for evaluating methods to handle missing data, demonstrating its effectiveness using a large dataset of type-2 diabetes patients and providing insights into how various imputation techniques perform.*
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Background: Stratification of patients with post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC, or long COVID) would allow precision clinical management strategies. However, long COVID is incompletely understood and characterised by a wide range of manifestations that are difficult to analyse computationally. Additionally, the generalisability of machine learning classification of COVID-19 clinical outcomes has rarely been tested.

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Article Synopsis
  • * They analyzed electronic health records from 52 hospitals and found that metformin significantly reduced the incidence of severe COVID-19 compared to other treatments in those with prediabetes.
  • * While metformin showed some benefits for COVID-19 severity in patients with PCOS, the results were not as strong compared to those in the prediabetes group, highlighting metformin's potential benefits for different conditions.
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Unlabelled: Acute COVID-19 infection can be followed by diverse clinical manifestations referred to as Post Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV2 Infection (PASC). Studies have shown an increased risk of being diagnosed with new-onset psychiatric disease following a diagnosis of acute COVID-19. However, it was unclear whether non-psychiatric PASC-associated manifestations (PASC-AMs) are associated with an increased risk of new-onset psychiatric disease following COVID-19.

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Background: With the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, identifying medications that improve COVID-19 outcomes is crucial. Studies suggest that use of metformin, an oral antihyperglycemic, is associated with reduced COVID-19 severity in individuals with diabetes compared to other antihyperglycemic medications. Some patients without diabetes, including those with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and prediabetes, are prescribed metformin for off-label use, which provides an opportunity to further investigate the effect of metformin on COVID-19.

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Accurate stratification of patients with post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC, or long COVID) would allow precision clinical management strategies. However, the natural history of long COVID is incompletely understood and characterized by an extremely wide range of manifestations that are difficult to analyze computationally. In addition, the generalizability of machine learning classification of COVID-19 clinical outcomes has rarely been tested.

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Background: Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are commonly used to reduce pain, fever, and inflammation but have been associated with complications in community-acquired pneumonia. Observations shortly after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 suggested that ibuprofen was associated with an increased risk of adverse events in COVID-19 patients, but subsequent observational studies failed to demonstrate increased risk and in one case showed reduced risk associated with NSAID use.

Methods: A 38-center retrospective cohort study was performed that leveraged the harmonized, high-granularity electronic health record data of the National COVID Cohort Collaborative.

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Background: COVID-19 has been shown to increase the risk of adverse mental health consequences. A recent electronic health record (EHR)-based observational study showed an almost two-fold increased risk of new-onset mental illness in the first 90 days following a diagnosis of acute COVID-19.

Methods: We used the National COVID Cohort Collaborative, a harmonized EHR repository with 2,965,506 COVID-19 positive patients, and compared cohorts of COVID-19 patients with comparable controls.

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Article Synopsis
  • Research on inhibiting protein kinases (PKs) has been crucial in cancer therapy, with about 8% of PKs targeted by FDA-approved drugs and numerous inhibitors in clinical trials.
  • A new approach using natural language processing and machine learning is presented to analyze relationships between PKs and various cancers, predicting which PKs to inhibit for effective treatment.
  • This method represents PKs and cancers as 100-dimensional vectors derived from PubMed abstracts, and uses data from clinical trials to accurately forecast PK-cancer associations, aiding in the design of targeted clinical trials for novel therapies.
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Article Synopsis
  • The text discusses the challenges in understanding long COVID (PASC) due to varied terminologies and inconsistent methods in studies, making it hard to compare findings.
  • It highlights the importance of using the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) to create standardized terminology for clinical manifestations associated with long COVID, facilitating better data integration across research studies.
  • The authors curated relevant studies and identified 287 unique clinical findings, noting that while fatigue was the most reported symptom, there was a wide range of reports and terminology used by different studies.
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Samango monkeys (Cercopithecus albogularis schwarzi) in the Soutpansberg Mountains, South Africa, experience a highly seasonal climate, with relatively cold, dry winters. They must show behavioural flexibility to survive these difficult conditions near the southern limit of the species' distribution and maintain the minimum nutritional intake they require. Through environmental monitoring and behavioural observations of a habituated group of samango monkeys, we explored how they adapted to the highly seasonal climate they experienced in the mountains.

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Background: Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are commonly used to reduce pain, fever, and inflammation but have been associated with complications in community-acquired pneumonia. Observations shortly after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 suggested that ibuprofen was associated with an increased risk of adverse events in COVID-19 patients, but subsequent observational studies failed to demonstrate increased risk and in one case showed reduced risk associated with NSAID use.

Methods: A 38-center retrospective cohort study was performed that leveraged the harmonized, high-granularity electronic health record data of the National COVID Cohort Collaborative.

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Primate species are characterised by variation in foraging behaviour and dietary composition across their geographic range. Here we examine how ecological conditions account for variation in the behavioural ecology of a widespread arboreal guenon, Cercopithecus mitis. Although substantial variation existed in time budgets, group size, home range and day journey length, clear biogeographic patterns were not apparent.

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