title: Association studies on cervical cancer facilitated by inference and semantic technologies: the assist approach.
abstract: Cervical cancer (CxCa) is currently the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths, for women between 20 and 39 years old. As infection by the human papillomavirus (HPV) is considered as the central risk factor for CxCa, current research focuses on the role of specific genetic and environmental factors in determining HPV persistence and subsequent progression of the disease. ASSIST is an EU-funded research project that aims to facilitate the design and execution of genetic association studies on CxCa in a systematic way by adopting inference and semantic technologies. Toward this goal, ASSIST provides the means for seamless integration and virtual unification of distributed and heterogeneous CxCa data repositories, and the underlying mechanisms to undertake the entire process of expressing and statistically evaluating medical hypotheses based on the collected data in order to generate medically important associations. The ultimate goal for ASSIST is to foster the biomedical research community by providing an open, integrated and collaborative framework to facilitate genetic association studies.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece. mitkas@auth.gr
authors.forename: Pericles
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Mitkas
authors.forename: Vassilis
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Koutkias
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Symeonidis
authors.forename: Manolis
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Falelakis
authors.forename: Christos
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Diou
authors.forename: Irini
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Lekka
authors.forename: Anastasios
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Delopoulos
authors.forename: Theodoros
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Agorastos
authors.forename: Nicos
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Maglaveras
mesh_terms: D003195:Computer Communication Networks; D003199:Computer Systems; D016206:Databases, Bibliographic; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D005260:Female; D036281:Genetic Research; D005838:Genotype; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D016490:Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems; D008492:Medical Informatics Computing; D010641:Phenotype; D012660:Semantics; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D002583:Uterine Cervical Neoplasms / Q000235:genetics*; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled