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. 2011 Dec;2(4):438-54.
doi: 10.1007/s12975-011-0121-1. Epub 2011 Nov 18.

Syndromics: a bioinformatics approach for neurotrauma research

Adam R Ferguson  1 , Ellen D Stück, Jessica L Nielson
Affiliations

Syndromics: a bioinformatics approach for neurotrauma research

Adam R Ferguson et al. Transl Stroke Res. 2011 Dec.

Abstract

Substantial scientific progress has been made in the past 50 years in delineating many of the biological mechanisms involved in the primary and secondary injuries following trauma to the spinal cord and brain. These advances have highlighted numerous potential therapeutic approaches that may help restore function after injury. Despite these advances, bench-to-bedside translation has remained elusive. Translational testing of novel therapies requires standardized measures of function for comparison across different laboratories, paradigms, and species. Although numerous functional assessments have been developed in animal models, it remains unclear how to best integrate this information to describe the complete translational "syndrome" produced by neurotrauma. The present paper describes a multivariate statistical framework for integrating diverse neurotrauma data and reviews the few papers to date that have taken an information-intensive approach for basic neurotrauma research. We argue that these papers can be described as the seminal works of a new field that we call "syndromics", which aim to apply informatics tools to disease models to characterize the full set of mechanistic inter-relationships from multi-scale data. In the future, centralized databases of raw neurotrauma data will enable better syndromic approaches and aid future translational research, leading to more efficient testing regimens and more clinically relevant findings.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Iterative relationship between data acquisition and computational results
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Categories of statistical methods
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Correlation distillation as a syndromic framework. The goal of syndromic analysis is to convert a low-level univariate statistical relationships (lines) among observed variables (boxes) into b a multivariate view of the underlying syndromic states (circles). The multivariate representation in b, known as a path diagram, is consistent with the conventions of structural equation modeling where directional arrows are used to indicate cause-and-effect relationships. From this perspective, underlying syndrome states are conceptualized as the cause of observed outcomes, and multivariate outcome monitoring provides a more accurate window into the underlying syndrome. With more measures, the picture of the underlying syndrome becomes more clear and less distorted by the error in individual measures
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Methodological workflow for syndromic analysis
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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