bioRxiv Science⌕ Search

Biology subjects

Tchechmedjiev, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Tchechmedjiev, A..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

Characterization of spatiotemporal dynamics in EEG data during picture naming with optical flow patterns

We present an analysis of the spatiotemporal dynamics of the oscillations in the electric potential that arises from neural activity. Depending on the frequency and phase of oscillations, these dynamics can be characterized as standing waves or as out-of-phase and modulated waves, which represent a combination of standing and moving waves. We characterize these dynamics as optical flow patterns, in terms of sources, sinks, spirals and saddles. Analytical and numerical solutions are compared with real EEG data acquired during a picture-naming task. Analytical approximation of standing waves allows us to establish some properties of pattern location and number. Namely, sources and sinks have mainly the same location, while saddles are located between them. The number of saddles correlates with the sum of all the other patterns. These properties are confirmed in both the simulated and real EEG data.

neuroscience↗

PGxO and PGxLOD: a reconciliation of pharmacogenomic knowledge of various provenances, enabling further comparison

BackgroundPharmacogenomics (PGx) studies how genomic variations impact variations in drug response phenotypes. Knowledge in pharmacogenomics is typically composed of units that have the form of ternary relationships gene variant - drug - adverse event. Such a relationship states that an adverse event may occur for patients having the speciifed gene variant and being exposed to the specified drug. State-of-the-art knowledge in PGx is mainly available in reference databases such as PharmGKB and reported in scientific biomedical literature. But, PGx knowledge can also be discovered from clinical data, such as Electronic Health Records (EHRs), and in this case, may either correspond to new knowledge or confirm state-of-the-art knowledge that lacks \"clinical counterpart\" or validation. For this reason, there is a need for automatic comparison of knowledge units from distinct sources.\n\nResultsIn this article, we propose an approach, based on Semantic Web technologies, to represent and compare PGx knowledge units. To this end, we developed PGxO, a simple ontology that represents PGx knowledge units and their components. Combined with PROV-O, an ontology developed by the W3C to represent provenance information, PGxO enables encoding and associating provenance information to PGx relationships. Additionally, we introduce a set of rules to reconcile PGx knowledge, i.e. to identify when two relationships, potentially expressed using different vocabularies and level of granularity, refer to the same, or to different knowledge units. We evaluated our ontology and rules by populating PGxO with knowledge units extracted from PharmGKB (2,701), the literature (65,720) and from discoveries reported from EHR analysis studies (only 10, manually extracted); and by testing their similarity. We called PGxLOD (PGx Linked Open Data) the resulting knowledge base that represents and reconciles knowledge units of those various origins.\n\nConclusionsThe proposed ontology and reconciliation rules constitute a first step toward a more complete framework for knowledge comparison in PGx. In this direction, the experimental instantiation of PGxO, named PGxLOD, illustrates the ability and difficulties of reconciling various existing knowledge sources.

bioinformatics↗