Computationally Linking Chemical Exposure to Molecular Effects with Complex Data: Comparing Methods to Disentangle Chemical Drivers in Environmental Mixtures and Knowledge-based Deep Learning for Predictions in Environmental Toxicology

Chemical exposures affect the environment and may lead to adverse outcomes in its organisms. Omics-based approaches, like standardised microarray experiments, have expanded the toolbox to monitor the distribution of chemicals and assess the risk to organisms in the environment. The resulting complex data have extended the scope of toxicological knowledge bases and published literature. A plethora of computational approaches have been applied in environmental toxicology considering systems biology and data integration. Still, the complexity of environmental and biological systems given in data challenges investigations of exposure-related effects. This thesis aimed at computationally linking chemical exposure to biological effects on the molecular level considering sources of complex environmental data. The first study employed data of an omics-based exposure study considering mixture effects in a freshwater environment. We compared three data-driven analyses in their suitability to disentangle mixture effects of chemical exposures to biological effects and their reliability in attributing potentially adverse outcomes to chemical drivers with toxicological databases on gene and pathway levels. Differential gene expression analysis and a network inference approach resulted in toxicologically meaningful outcomes and uncovered individual chemical effects — stand-alone and in combination. We developed an integrative computational strategy to harvest exposure-related gene associations from environmental samples considering mixtures of lowly concentrated compounds. The applied approaches allowed assessing the hazard of chemicals more systematically with correlation-based compound groups. This dissertation presents another achievement toward a data-driven hypothesis generation for molecular exposure effects. The approach combined text-mining and deep learning. The study was entirely data-driven and involved state-of-the-art computational methods of artificial intelligence. We employed literature-based relational data and curated toxicological knowledge to predict chemical-biomolecule interactions. A word embedding neural network with a subsequent feed-forward network was implemented. Data augmentation and recurrent neural networks were beneficial for training with curated toxicological knowledge. The trained models reached accuracies of up to 94% for unseen test data of the employed knowledge base. However, we could not reliably confirm known chemical-gene interactions across selected data sources. Still, the predictive models might derive unknown information from toxicological knowledge sources, like literature, databases or omics-based exposure studies. Thus, the deep learning models might allow predicting hypotheses of exposure-related molecular effects. Both achievements of this dissertation might support the prioritisation of chemicals for testing and an intelligent selection of chemicals for monitoring in future exposure studies.:Table of Contents ... I Abstract ... V Acknowledgements ... VII Prelude ... IX 1 Introduction 1.1 An overview of environmental toxicology ... 2 1.1.1 Environmental toxicology ... 2 1.1.2 Chemicals in the environment ... 4 1.1.3 Systems biological perspectives in environmental toxicology ... 7 Computational toxicology ... 11 1.2.1 Omics-based approaches ... 12 1.2.2 Linking chemical exposure to transcriptional effects ... 14 1.2.3 Up-scaling from the gene level to higher biological organisation levels ... 19 1.2.4 Biomedical literature-based discovery ... 24 1.2.5 Deep learning with knowledge representation ... 27 1.3 Research question and approaches ... 29 2 Methods and Data ... 33 2.1 Linking environmental relevant mixture exposures to transcriptional effects ... 34 2.1.1 Exposure and microarray data ... 34 2.1.2 Preprocessing ... 35 2.1.3 Differential gene expression ... 37 2.1.4 Association rule mining ... 38 2.1.5 Weighted gene correlation network analysis ... 39 2.1.6 Method comparison ... 41 Predicting exposure-related effects on a molecular level ... 44 2.2.1 Input ... 44 2.2.2 Input preparation ... 47 2.2.3 Deep learning models ... 49 2.2.4 Toxicogenomic application ... 54 3 Method comparison to link complex stream water exposures to effects on the transcriptional level ... 57 3.1 Background and motivation ... 58 3.1.1 Workflow ... 61 3.2 Results ... 62 3.2.1 Data preprocessing ... 62 3.2.2 Differential gene expression analysis ... 67 3.2.3 Association rule mining ... 71 3.2.4 Network inference ... 78 3.2.5 Method comparison ... 84 3.2.6 Application case of method integration ... 87 3.3 Discussion ... 91 3.4 Conclusion ... 99 4 Deep learning prediction of chemical-biomolecule interactions ... 101 4.1 Motivation ... 102 4.1.1Workflow ...105 4.2 Results ... 107 4.2.1 Input preparation ... 107 4.2.2 Model selection ... 110 4.2.3 Model comparison ... 118 4.2.4 Toxicogenomic application ... 121 4.2.5 Horizontal augmentation without tail-padding ...123 4.2.6 Four-class problem formulation ... 124 4.2.7 Training with CTD data ... 125 4.3 Discussion ... 129 4.3.1 Transferring biomedical knowledge towards toxicology ... 129 4.3.2 Deep learning with biomedical knowledge representation ...133 4.3.3 Data integration ...136 4.4 Conclusion ... 141 5 Conclusion and Future perspectives ... 143 5.1 Conclusion ... 143 5.1.1 Investigating complex mixtures in the environment ... 144 5.1.2 Complex knowledge from literature and curated databases predict chemical- biomolecule interactions ... 145 5.1.3 Linking chemical exposure to biological effects by integrating CTD ... 146 5.2 Future perspectives ... 147 S1 Supplement Chapter 1 ... 153 S1.1 Example of an estrogen bioassay ... 154 S1.2 Types of mode of action ... 154 S1.3 The dogma of molecular biology ... 157 S1.4 Transcriptomics ... 159 S2 Supplement Chapter 3 ... 161 S3 Supplement Chapter 4 ... 175 S3.1 Hyperparameter tuning results ... 176 S3.2 Functional enrichment with predicted chemical-gene interactions and CTD reference pathway genesets ... 179 S3.3 Reduction of learning rate in a model with large word embedding vectors ... 183 S3.4 Horizontal augmentation without tail-padding ... 183 S3.5 Four-relationship classification ... 185 S3.6 Interpreting loss observations for SemMedDB trained models ... 187 List of Abbreviations ... i List of Figures ... vi List of Tables ... x Bibliography ... xii Curriculum scientiae ... xxxix Selbständigkeitserklärung ... xlii

Relation Prediction over Biomedical Knowledge Bases for Drug Repositioning

Identifying new potential treatment options for medical conditions that cause human disease burden is a central task of biomedical research. Since all candidate drugs cannot be tested with animal and clinical trials, in vitro approaches are first attempted to identify promising candidates. Likewise, identifying other essential relations (e.g., causation, prevention) between biomedical entities is also critical to understand biomedical processes. Hence, it is crucial to develop automated relation prediction systems that can yield plausible biomedical relations to expedite the discovery process. In this dissertation, we demonstrate three approaches to predict treatment relations between biomedical entities for the drug repositioning task using existing biomedical knowledge bases. Our approaches can be broadly labeled as link prediction or knowledge base completion in computer science literature. Specifically, first we investigate the predictive power of graph paths connecting entities in the publicly available biomedical knowledge base, SemMedDB (the entities and relations constitute a large knowledge graph as a whole). To that end, we build logistic regression models utilizing semantic graph pattern features extracted from the SemMedDB to predict treatment and causative relations in Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus. Second, we study matrix and tensor factorization algorithms for predicting drug repositioning pairs in repoDB, a general purpose gold standard database of approved and failed drug–disease indications. The idea here is to predict repoDB pairs by approximating the given input matrix/tensor structure where the value of a cell represents the existence of a relation coming from SemMedDB and UMLS knowledge bases. The essential goal is to predict the test pairs that have a blank cell in the input matrix/tensor based on the shared biomedical context among existing non-blank cells. Our final approach involves graph convolutional neural networks where entities and relation types are embedded in a vector space involving neighborhood information. Basically, we minimize an objective function to guide our model to concept/relation embeddings such that distance scores for positive relation pairs are lower than those for the negative ones. Overall, our results demonstrate that recent link prediction methods applied to automatically curated, and hence imprecise, knowledge bases can nevertheless result in high accuracy drug candidate prediction with appropriate configuration of both the methods and datasets used

Knowledge-based Biomedical Data Science 2019

Knowledge-based biomedical data science (KBDS) involves the design and implementation of computer systems that act as if they knew about biomedicine. Such systems depend on formally represented knowledge in computer systems, often in the form of knowledge graphs. Here we survey the progress in the last year in systems that use formally represented knowledge to address data science problems in both clinical and biological domains, as well as on approaches for creating knowledge graphs. Major themes include the relationships between knowledge graphs and machine learning, the use of natural language processing, and the expansion of knowledge-based approaches to novel domains, such as Chinese Traditional Medicine and biodiversity.Comment: Manuscript 43 pages with 3 tables; Supplemental material 43 pages with 3 table

Comparing Attributional and Relational Similarity as a Means to Identify Clinically Relevant Drug-gene Relationships

In emerging domains, such as precision oncology, knowledge extracted from explicit assertions may be insufficient to identify relationships of interest. One solution to this problem involves drawing inference on the basis of similarity. Computational methods have been developed to estimate the semantic similarity and relatedness between terms and relationships that are distributed across corpora of literature such as Medline abstracts and other forms of human readable text. Most research on distributional similarity has focused on the notion of attributional similarity, which estimates the similarity between entities based on the contexts in which they occur across a large corpus. A relatively under-researched area concerns relational similarity, in which the similarity between pairs of entities is estimated from the contexts in which these entity pairs occur together. While it seems intuitive that models capturing the structure of the relationships between entities might mediate the identification of biologically important relationships, there is to date no comparison of the relative utility of attributional and relational models for this purpose. In this research, I compare the performance of a range of relational and attributional similarity methods, on the task of identifying drugs that may be therapeutically useful in the context of particular aberrant genes, as identified by a team of human experts. My hypothesis is that relational similarity will be of greater utility than attributional similarity as a means to identify biological relationships that may provide answers to clinical questions, (such as “which drugs INHIBIT gene x”?) in the context of rapidly evolving domains. My results show that models based on relational similarity outperformed models based on attributional similarity on this task. As the methods explained in this research can be applied to identify any sort of relationship for which cue pairs exist, my results suggest that relational similarity may be a suitable approach to apply to other biomedical problems. Furthermore, I found models based on neural word embeddings (NWE) to be particularly useful for this task, given their higher performance than Random Indexing-based models, and significantly less computational effort needed to create them. NWE methods (such as those produced by the popular word2vec tool) are a relatively recent development in the domain of distributional semantics, and are considered by many as the state-of-the-art when it comes to semantic language modeling. However, their application in identifying biologically important relationships from Medline in general, and specifically, in the domain of precision oncology has not been well studied. The results of this research can guide the design and implementation of biomedical question answering and other relationship extraction applications for precision medicine, precision oncology and other similar domains, where there is rapid emergence of novel knowledge. The methods developed and evaluated in this project can help NLP applications provide more accurate results by leveraging corpus based methods that are by design scalable and robust

Literature Based Discovery (LBD): Towards Hypothesis Generation and Knowledge Discovery in Biomedical Text Mining

Biomedical knowledge is growing in an astounding pace with a majority of this knowledge is represented as scientific publications. Text mining tools and methods represents automatic approaches for extracting hidden patterns and trends from this semi structured and unstructured data. In Biomedical Text mining, Literature Based Discovery (LBD) is the process of automatically discovering novel associations between medical terms otherwise mentioned in disjoint literature sets. LBD approaches proven to be successfully reducing the discovery time of potential associations that are hidden in the vast amount of scientific literature. The process focuses on creating concept profiles for medical terms such as a disease or symptom and connecting it with a drug and treatment based on the statistical significance of the shared profiles. This knowledge discovery approach introduced in 1989 still remains as a core task in text mining. Currently the ABC principle based two approaches namely open discovery and closed discovery are mostly explored in LBD process. This review starts with general introduction about text mining followed by biomedical text mining and introduces various literature resources such as MEDLINE, UMLS, MESH, and SemMedDB. This is followed by brief introduction of the core ABC principle and its associated two approaches open discovery and closed discovery in LBD process. This review also discusses the deep learning applications in LBD by reviewing the role of transformer models and neural networks based LBD models and its future aspects. Finally, reviews the key biomedical discoveries generated through LBD approaches in biomedicine and conclude with the current limitations and future directions of LBD.Comment: 43 Pages, 5 Figures, 4 Table

Improving Automated Literature-based Discovery with Neural Networks: Neural biomedical Named Entity Recognition, Link Prediction and Discovery

Literature-based Discovery (LBD) uses information from explicit statements in literature to generate new or unstated knowledge. Automated LBD can thus facilitate hypothesis testing and generation from large collections of publications to support and accelerate scientific research, which is adversely affected by publication explosion and knowledge fragmentation. Existing methods, however, use methodologies which are inadequate for capturing the complex information available in scientific literature and are prone to proposing spurious discoveries or an abundance of low-quality ones. To be capable of solving these problems, automated LBD needs to accurately glean the extensive information present in literature, cope with the dynamic nature of scientific knowledge and place high-quality proposals at the top of ranked outputs. Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) allow for deep textual analysis to obtain a wide coverage of information present in text and can adapt easily to recognising new biomedical entities and terms. Similarly, recent advances in graph processing have made it possible to do in-depth analysis on information represented as graphs, such as published biomedical connections, to facilitate high-quality knowledge discovery. Both of these advances utilise neural networks extensively. This work used neural networks in a bid to advance automated LBD in three ways: 1) improving biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) to extract entities from unstructured text by using multi-task learning across multiple biomedical datasets; 2) improving knowledge discovery from realistic, random- and time-sliced biomedical graphs using link prediction and 3) improving the ranking of published discoveries on open- and closed- LBD instances by scoring the strength of connection paths using neural models. Excitingly, the latter approaches outperformed those used by the state-of-the-art LION LBD system, indicating that their integration into it would provide better support to cancer researchers using it. The results from this work show that it is feasible to use neural networks to improve LBD in different ways. They also demonstrate that neural networks are versatile enough to be applied to improve traditional as well as non-traditional LBD. The principal implication of these findings is that neural biomedical knowledge discovery, especially LBD, is presently useful in addition to being a potentially rich field for further study.Cambridge Commonwealth, European & International Trus

KindMed: Knowledge-Induced Medicine Prescribing Network for Medication Recommendation

Extensive adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) offers opportunities for its use in various clinical analyses. We could acquire more comprehensive insights by enriching an EHR cohort with external knowledge (e.g., standardized medical ontology and wealthy semantics curated on the web) as it divulges a spectrum of informative relations between observed medical codes. This paper proposes a novel Knowledge-Induced Medicine Prescribing Network (KindMed) framework to recommend medicines by inducing knowledge from myriad medical-related external sources upon the EHR cohort, rendering them as medical knowledge graphs (KGs). On top of relation-aware graph representation learning to unravel an adequate embedding of such KGs, we leverage hierarchical sequence learning to discover and fuse clinical and medicine temporal dynamics across patients' historical admissions for encouraging personalized recommendations. In predicting safe, precise, and personalized medicines, we devise an attentive prescribing that accounts for and associates three essential aspects, i.e., a summary of joint historical medical records, clinical condition progression, and the current clinical state of patients. We exhibited the effectiveness of our KindMed on the augmented real-world EHR cohorts, etching leading performances against graph-driven competing baselines

딥 뉴럴 네트워크를 활용한 의학 개념 및 환자 표현 학습과 의료 문제에의 응용

학위논문(박사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 공과대학 전기·정보공학부, 2022. 8. 정교민.본 학위 논문은 전국민 의료 보험데이터인 표본코호트DB를 활용하여 딥 뉴럴 네트워크 기반의 의학 개념 및 환자 표현 학습 방법과 의료 문제 해결 방법을 제안한다. 먼저 순차적인 환자 의료 기록과 개인 프로파일 정보를 기반으로 환자 표현을 학습하고 향후 질병 진단 가능성을 예측하는 재귀신경망 모델을 제안하였다. 우리는 다양한 성격의 환자 정보를 효율적으로 혼합하는 구조를 도입하여 큰 성능 향상을 얻었다. 또한 환자의 의료 기록을 이루는 의료 코드들을 분산 표현으로 나타내 추가 성능 개선을 이루었다. 이를 통해 의료 코드의 분산 표현이 중요한 시간적 정보를 담고 있음을 확인하였고, 이어지는 연구에서는 이러한 시간적 정보가 강화될 수 있도록 그래프 구조를 도입하였다. 우리는 의료 코드의 분산 표현 간의 유사도와 통계적 정보를 가지고 그래프를 구축하였고 그래프 뉴럴 네트워크를 활용, 시간/통계적 정보가 강화된 의료 코드의 표현 벡터를 얻었다. 획득한 의료 코드 벡터를 통해 시판 약물의 잠재적인 부작용 신호를 탐지하는 모델을 제안한 결과, 기존의 부작용 데이터베이스에 존재하지 않는 사례까지도 예측할 수 있음을 보였다. 마지막으로 분량에 비해 주요 정보가 희소하다는 의료 기록의 한계를 극복하기 위해 지식그래프를 활용하여 사전 의학 지식을 보강하였다. 이때 환자의 의료 기록을 구성하는 지식그래프의 부분만을 추출하여 개인화된 지식그래프를 만들고 그래프 뉴럴 네트워크를 통해 그래프의 표현 벡터를 획득하였다. 최종적으로 순차적인 의료 기록을 함축한 환자 표현과 더불어 개인화된 의학 지식을 함축한 표현을 함께 사용하여 향후 질병 및 진단 예측 문제에 활용하였다.This dissertation proposes a deep neural network-based medical concept and patient representation learning methods using medical claims data to solve two healthcare tasks, i.e., clinical outcome prediction and post-marketing adverse drug reaction (ADR) signal detection. First, we propose SAF-RNN, a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)-based model that learns a deep patient representation based on the clinical sequences and patient characteristics. Our proposed model fuses different types of patient records using feature-based gating and self-attention. We demonstrate that high-level associations between two heterogeneous records are effectively extracted by our model, thus achieving state-of-the-art performances for predicting the risk probability of cardiovascular disease. Secondly, based on the observation that the distributed medical code embeddings represent temporal proximity between the medical codes, we introduce a graph structure to enhance the code embeddings with such temporal information. We construct a graph using the distributed code embeddings and the statistical information from the claims data. We then propose the Graph Neural Network(GNN)-based representation learning for post-marketing ADR detection. Our model shows competitive performances and provides valid ADR candidates. Finally, rather than using patient records alone, we utilize a knowledge graph to augment the patient representation with prior medical knowledge. Using SAF-RNN and GNN, the deep patient representation is learned from the clinical sequences and the personalized medical knowledge. It is then used to predict clinical outcomes, i.e., next diagnosis prediction and CVD risk prediction, resulting in state-of-the-art performances.1 Introduction 1 2 Background 8 2.1 Medical Concept Embedding 8 2.2 Encoding Sequential Information in Clinical Records 11 3 Deep Patient Representation with Heterogeneous Information 14 3.1 Related Work 16 3.2 Problem Statement 19 3.3 Method 20 3.3.1 RNN-based Disease Prediction Model 20 3.3.2 Self-Attentive Fusion (SAF) Encoder 23 3.4 Dataset and Experimental Setup 24 3.4.1 Dataset 24 3.4.2 Experimental Design 26 ii 3.4.3 Implementation Details 27 3.5 Experimental Results 28 3.5.1 Evaluation of CVD Prediction 28 3.5.2 Sensitivity Analysis 28 3.5.3 Ablation Studies 31 3.6 Further Investigation 32 3.6.1 Case Study: Patient-Centered Analysis 32 3.6.2 Data-Driven CVD Risk Factors 32 3.7 Conclusion 33 4 Graph-Enhanced Medical Concept Embedding 40 4.1 Related Work 42 4.2 Problem Statement 43 4.3 Method 44 4.3.1 Code Embedding Learning with Skip-gram Model 44 4.3.2 Drug-disease Graph Construction 45 4.3.3 A GNN-based Method for Learning Graph Structure 47 4.4 Dataset and Experimental Setup 49 4.4.1 Dataset 49 4.4.2 Experimental Design 50 4.4.3 Implementation Details 52 4.5 Experimental Results 53 4.5.1 Evaluation of ADR Detection 53 4.5.2 Newly-Described ADR Candidates 54 4.6 Conclusion 55 5 Knowledge-Augmented Deep Patient Representation 57 5.1 Related Work 60 5.1.1 Incorporating Prior Medical Knowledge for Clinical Outcome Prediction 60 5.1.2 Inductive KGC based on Subgraph Learning 61 5.2 Method 61 5.2.1 Extracting Personalized KG 61 5.2.2 KA-SAF: Knowledge-Augmented Self-Attentive Fusion Encoder 64 5.2.3 KGC as a Pre-training Task 68 5.2.4 Subgraph Infomax: SGI 69 5.3 Dataset and Experimental Setup 72 5.3.1 Clinical Outcome Prediction 72 5.3.2 Next Diagnosis Prediction 72 5.4 Experimental Results 73 5.4.1 Cardiovascular Disease Prediction 73 5.4.2 Next Diagnosis Prediction 73 5.4.3 KGC on SemMed KG 73 5.5 Conclusion 74 6 Conclusion 77 Abstract (In Korean) 90 Acknowlegement 92박