title: InterVar: Clinical Interpretation of Genetic Variants by the 2015 ACMG-AMP Guidelines.
abstract: In 2015, the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) and the Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP) published updated standards and guidelines for the clinical interpretation of sequence variants with respect to human diseases on the basis of 28 criteria. However, variability between individual interpreters can be extensive because of reasons such as the different understandings of these guidelines and the lack of standard algorithms for implementing them, yet computational tools for semi-automated variant interpretation are not available. To address these problems, we propose a suite of methods for implementing these criteria and have developed a tool called InterVar to help human reviewers interpret the clinical significance of variants. InterVar can take a pre-annotated or VCF file as input and generate automated interpretation on 18 criteria. Furthermore, we have developed a companion web server, wInterVar, to enable user-friendly variant interpretation with an automated interpretation step and a manual adjustment step. These tools are especially useful for addressing severe congenital or very early-onset developmental disorders with high penetrance. Using results from a few published sequencing studies, we demonstrate the utility of InterVar in significantly reducing the time to interpret the clinical significance of sequence variants.
authors.affiliation: Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
authors.forename: Quan
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA; Institute for Genomic Medicine, Columbia University, New York, NY 10032, USA; Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, NY 10032, USA. Electronic address: kw2701@cumc.columbia.edu.
authors.forename: Kai
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D019295:Computational Biology; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D005820:Genetic Testing; D014644:Genetic Variation; D015894:Genome, Human; D023281:Genomics; D059014:High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D020125:Mutation, Missense; D065886:Neurodevelopmental Disorders / Q000235:genetics*; D012984:Software
keywords: ACMG; ANNOVAR; ClinVar; InterVar; clinical interpretation; genetic diagnosis; variant annotation; variant interpretation