Publications by authors named "Kenney Ng"

Background: Developing medicine from scratch to governmental authorization and detecting adverse drug reactions (ADR) have barely been economical, expeditious, and risk-averse investments. The availability of large-scale observational healthcare databases and the popularity of large language models offer an unparalleled opportunity to enable automatic high-throughput drug screening for both repurposing and pharmacovigilance.

Objectives: To demonstrate a general workflow for automatic high-throughput drug screening with the following advantages: (i) the association of various exposure on diseases can be estimated; (ii) both repurposing and pharmacovigilance are integrated; (iii) accurate exposure length for each prescription is parsed from clinical texts; (iv) intrinsic relationship between drugs and diseases are removed jointly by bioinformatic mapping and large language model - ChatGPT; (v) causal-wise interpretations for incidence rate contrasts are provided.

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Article Synopsis
  • There is growing interest in the additional benefits of metformin, beyond its primary use for managing type 2 diabetes, including potential protective effects against cardiovascular issues, cognitive decline, and cancer.
  • This study compared cancer risk in patients using metformin versus those using sulfonylureas, using a large dataset from the UK, to investigate if metformin offers any significant protective effect against cancer over a 6-year period.
  • The results indicated that metformin did not significantly reduce cancer risk compared to sulfonylureas, and the analysis faced challenges including the disparity of data overlap and the issue of pre-cancer deaths affecting the outcomes.
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Objective: To characterize distinct islet autoantibody profiles preceding stage 3 type 1 diabetes.

Research Design And Methods: The T1DI (Type 1 Diabetes Intelligence) study combined data from 1,845 genetically susceptible prospectively observed children who were positive for at least one islet autoantibody: insulin autoantibody (IAA), GAD antibody (GADA), or islet antigen 2 antibody (IA-2A). Using a novel similarity algorithm that considers an individual's temporal autoantibody profile, age at autoantibody appearance, and variation in the positivity of autoantibody types, we performed an unsupervised hierarchical clustering analysis.

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Fibrotic diseases affect multiple organs and are associated with morbidity and mortality. To examine organ-specific and shared biologic mechanisms that underlie fibrosis in different organs, we developed machine learning models to quantify T1 time, a marker of interstitial fibrosis, in the liver, pancreas, heart and kidney among 43,881 UK Biobank participants who underwent magnetic resonance imaging. In phenome-wide association analyses, we demonstrate the association of increased organ-specific T1 time, reflecting increased interstitial fibrosis, with prevalent diseases across multiple organ systems.

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  • * Using advanced models, researchers analyzed cardiac MRI data from over 40,000 UK Biobank participants to assess left atrial volume metrics.
  • * A genome-wide study identified 20 genetic factors related to left atrial structure, suggesting that genetic predisposition to larger atrial volume increases the risk of atrial fibrillation and related issues like stroke.
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Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic presented a challenge to inpatient safety. It is unknown whether there were spillover effects due to COVID-19 into non-COVID-19 care and safety. We sought to evaluate the changes in inpatient Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality patient safety indicators (PSIs) in the United States before and during the first surge of the pandemic among patients admitted without COVID-19.

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A fundamental challenge in diagnostics is integrating multiple modalities to develop a joint characterization of physiological state. Using the heart as a model system, we develop a cross-modal autoencoder framework for integrating distinct data modalities and constructing a holistic representation of cardiovascular state. In particular, we use our framework to construct such cross-modal representations from cardiac magnetic resonance images (MRIs), containing structural information, and electrocardiograms (ECGs), containing myoelectric information.

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Myocardial interstitial fibrosis is associated with cardiovascular disease and adverse prognosis. Here, to investigate the biological pathways that underlie fibrosis in the human heart, we developed a machine learning model to measure native myocardial T1 time, a marker of myocardial fibrosis, in 41,505 UK Biobank participants who underwent cardiac magnetic resonance imaging. Greater T1 time was associated with diabetes mellitus, renal disease, aortic stenosis, cardiomyopathy, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, conduction disease and rheumatoid arthritis.

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Background: As the largest conduit vessel, the aorta is responsible for the conversion of phasic systolic inflow from ventricular ejection into more continuous peripheral blood delivery. Systolic distention and diastolic recoil conserve energy and are enabled by the specialized composition of the aortic extracellular matrix. Aortic distensibility decreases with age and vascular disease.

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Objective: To estimate the risk of progression to stage 3 type 1 diabetes based on varying definitions of multiple islet autoantibody positivity (mIA).

Research Design And Methods: Type 1 Diabetes Intelligence (T1DI) is a combined prospective data set of children from Finland, Germany, Sweden, and the U.S.

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For any given body mass index (BMI), individuals vary substantially in fat distribution, and this variation may have important implications for cardiometabolic risk. Here, we study disease associations with BMI-independent variation in visceral (VAT), abdominal subcutaneous (ASAT), and gluteofemoral (GFAT) fat depots in 40,032 individuals of the UK Biobank with body MRI. We apply deep learning models based on two-dimensional body MRI projections to enable near-perfect estimation of fat depot volumes (R in heldout dataset = 0.

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Aims/hypothesis: The aim of this study was to explore the utility of islet autoantibody (IAb) levels for the prediction of type 1 diabetes in autoantibody-positive children.

Methods: Prospective cohort studies in Finland, Germany, Sweden and the USA followed 24,662 children at increased genetic or familial risk of developing islet autoimmunity and diabetes. For the 1403 who developed IAbs (523 of whom developed diabetes), levels of autoantibodies against insulin (IAA), glutamic acid decarboxylase (GADA) and insulinoma-associated antigen-2 (IA-2A) were harmonised for analysis.

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Background: State-of-the-art genetic risk interpretation for a common complex disease such as coronary artery disease (CAD) requires assessment for both monogenic variants-such as those related to familial hypercholesterolemia-as well as the cumulative impact of many common variants, as quantified by a polygenic score.

Objectives: The objective of the study was to describe a combined monogenic and polygenic CAD risk assessment program and examine its impact on patient understanding and changes to clinical management.

Methods: Study participants attended an initial visit in a preventive genomics clinic and a disclosure visit to discuss results and recommendations, primarily via telemedicine.

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In our previous data-driven analysis of evolving patterns of islet autoantibodies (IAb) against insulin (IAA), GAD (GADA), and islet antigen 2 (IA-2A), we discovered three trajectories, characterized according to multiple IAb (TR1), IAA (TR2), or GADA (TR3) as the first appearing autoantibodies. Here we examined the evolution of IAb levels within these trajectories in 2,145 IAb-positive participants followed from early life and compared those who progressed to type 1 diabetes (n = 643) with those remaining undiagnosed (n = 1,502). With use of thresholds determined by 5-year diabetes risk, four levels were defined for each IAb and overlaid onto each visit.

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The clinical presentation of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a fatal neurodegenerative disease, varies widely across patients, making it challenging to determine if potential therapeutics slow progression. We sought to determine whether there were common patterns of disease progression that could aid in the design and analysis of clinical trials. We developed an approach based on a mixture of Gaussian processes to identify clusters of patients sharing similar disease progression patterns, modeling their average trajectories and the variability in each cluster.

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Background: The first surge of the COVID-19 pandemic entirely altered healthcare delivery. Whether this also altered the receipt of high- and low-value care is unknown.

Objective: To test the association between the April through June 2020 surge of COVID-19 and various high- and low-value care measures to determine how the delivery of care changed.

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Background: The left ventricular outflow tract (LVOT) and ascending aorta are spatially complex, with distinct pathologies and embryologic origins. Prior work examined the genetics of thoracic aortic diameter in a single plane.

Objectives: We sought to elucidate the genetic basis for the diameter of the LVOT, aortic root, and ascending aorta.

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Inter-individual variation in fat distribution is increasingly recognized as clinically important but is not routinely assessed in clinical practice, in part because medical imaging has not been practical to deploy at scale for this task. Here, we report a deep learning model trained on an individual's body shape outline-or "silhouette" -that enables accurate estimation of specific fat depots of interest, including visceral (VAT), abdominal subcutaneous (ASAT), and gluteofemoral (GFAT) adipose tissue volumes, and VAT/ASAT ratio. Two-dimensional coronal and sagittal silhouettes are constructed from whole-body magnetic resonance images in 40,032 participants of the UK Biobank and used as inputs for a convolutional neural network to predict each of these quantities.

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Prediction models are commonly used to estimate risk for cardiovascular diseases, to inform diagnosis and management. However, performance may vary substantially across relevant subgroups of the population. Here we investigated heterogeneity of accuracy and fairness metrics across a variety of subgroups for risk prediction of two common diseases: atrial fibrillation (AF) and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD).

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For any given level of overall adiposity, individuals vary considerably in fat distribution. The inherited basis of fat distribution in the general population is not fully understood. Here, we study up to 38,965 UK Biobank participants with MRI-derived visceral (VAT), abdominal subcutaneous (ASAT), and gluteofemoral (GFAT) adipose tissue volumes.

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Article Synopsis
  • Researchers used deep learning to analyze right heart structures in 40,000 individuals from the UK Biobank using MRI scans.
  • They identified 130 unique genetic loci associated with right heart measurements, with many not linked to left heart structures, and some near genes tied to congenital heart disease.
  • A genetic predictor for right ventricular function was found to correlate with the risk of developing dilated cardiomyopathy, emphasizing the importance of genetic factors in heart health.
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With availability of voluminous sets of observational data, an empirical paradigm to screen for drug repurposing opportunities (i.e., beneficial effects of drugs on nonindicated outcomes) is feasible.

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Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and availability of biological, medical, and healthcare data have enabled the development of a wide variety of models. Significant success has been achieved in a wide range of fields, such as genomics, protein folding, disease diagnosis, imaging, and clinical tasks. Although widely used, the inherent opacity of deep AI models has brought criticism from the research field and little adoption in clinical practice.

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Importance: Pathogenic variants associated with inherited cardiomyopathy are recognized as important and clinically actionable when identified, leading some clinicians to recommend population-wide genomic screening.

Objective: To determine the prevalence and clinical importance of pathogenic variants associated with inherited cardiomyopathy within the context of contemporary clinical care.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This was a genetic association study of participants in Atherosclerosis in Risk Communities (ARIC), recruited from 1987 to 1989, with median follow-up of 27 years, and the UK Biobank, recruited from 2006 to 2010, with median follow-up of 10 years.

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