title: DDA: A Novel Network-Based Scoring Method to Identify Disease-Disease Associations.
abstract: Categorizing human diseases provides higher efficiency and accuracy for disease diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. Disease-disease association (DDA) is a precious information that indicates the large-scale structure of complex relationships of diseases. However, the number of known and reliable associations is very small. Therefore, identification of DDAs is a challenging task in systems biology and medicine. Here, we developed a novel network-based scoring algorithm called DDA to identify the relationships between diseases in a large-scale study. Our method is developed based on a random walk prioritization in a protein-protein interaction network. This approach considers not only whether two diseases directly share associated genes but also the statistical relationships between two different diseases using known disease-related genes. Predicted associations were validated by known DDAs from a database and literature supports. The method yielded a good performance with an area under the curve of 71% and outperformed other standard association indices. Furthermore, novel DDAs and relationships among diseases from the clusters analysis were reported. This method is efficient to identify disease-disease relationships on an interaction network and can also be generalized to other association studies to further enhance knowledge in medical studies.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Applied Science, King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok, Bangkok, Thailand.
authors.forename: Apichat
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Suratanee
authors.affiliation: Integrative Bioinformatics and System Biology Group, Advanced Virtual and Intelligent Computing (AVIC) Research Center, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.
authors.forename: Kitiporn
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Plaimas
keywords: disease-disease association; network-based method; prioritization technique; scoring method