Re: Representing conflicting evidence and refutation

Dear all,

Interesting connections -- one of the main developers of the CADIAG-2 system 
(Prof. Klaus-Peter Adlassnig) was my PhD supervisor. While I was mainly 
interested in crisp reasoning back then, I also played around with 
fuzzy/probabilistic OWL reasoning. However, the scalability of these 
reasoners (such as Pronto) seemed to be very limited back then (two years 
ago). It is exciting to hear that this situation has seemingly improved in 
the meantime.

The trend towards personalized medicine could generate some very interesting 
use-cases, since the information about effects of certain SNPs, molecular 
pathway alterations, lifestyle and demographic factors are still quite 
incomplete and sometimes contradictory. One could extract the relevant data 
for each disease/drug and each patient to yield a knowledge base fragment of 
a manageable size, and then try to judge disease risk, drug efficacy or risk 
of adverse events based on imprecise reasoning.

Cheers,
Matthias Samwald

// DERI Galway, Ireland
// Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Austria
// http://samwald.info



--------------------------------------------------
From: "Joanne Luciano" <jluciano@cs.rpi.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2010 4:28 PM
To: "M. Scott Marshall" <mscottmarshall@gmail.com>
Cc: "HCLS" <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>; "Andrey Rzhetsky" 
<arzhetsk@medicine.bsd.uchicago.edu>; <pklinov@cs.man.ac.uk>; "Deborah 
McGuinness" <dlm@cs.rpi.edu>; "Jim McCusker" <james.mccusker@yale.edu>; 
"Dominic DiFranzo" <difrad@rpi.edu>; <divoli@uchicago.edu>
Subject: Re: Representing conflicting evidence and refutation

> Hi Scott,
>
> Interesting you should being this up.  Last week when I was at  Manchester 
> I attended the DL (Description Logics) lunch talk by PhD  Student Pavel 
> Klinov, The talk was on an analysis of CADIAG-2 KB. The  aim of the 
> project is to analyze (in)consistency of CADIAG-2 -- the  large medical 
> diagnosing system developed in Vienna in the 80s. The  approach is to 
> translate CADIAG-2 into a P-SH KB and compute all (or  most of) minimal 
> sets of conflicting rules. This is a joint work with  David Picado from 
> the Technical University of Vienna, who provided the  system and developed 
> its translation into P-SH.
>
> Conflicting information in text is exactly what Andrey was working  with. 
> His focus was in biological pathways.
>
> After the talk I had a chat with Pavel and thought that there we other 
> applications of his work, but we'd need to identify some data sets.  I 
> immediately thought of Andrey Rzhetsky's work on Geneways where he 
> addressed representing complementary data. I wrote to Andrey in hopes  of 
> getting some data with inconsistencies to see what Pavel's methods  would 
> uncover.
>
> I've copied both Andrey and Pavel on this email as well as a few form  the 
> TWC.
>
> Cheers,
> Joanne
>
>
>
> On Oct 13, 2010, at 9:43 AM, M. Scott Marshall wrote:
>
>> Lilly recently halted development of of the Alzheimer's drug
>> "semagacestat" because it was making patients worse in two late stage
>> clinical trials. This type of knowledge seems like very valuable
>> information to researchers in Alzheimer's. However, in recent searches
>> of http://clinicaltrials.gov such as
>> http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=semagacestat, it seems that
>> the news hasn't been incorporated into the data on the website.
>> However, assuming that it had been added, I am curious how 'cancelled
>> clinical trials' can be found in the linked data. Has anyone looked at
>> this?
>>
>> http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/lilly-halts-alzheimers-drug-trial/?scp=2&sq=alzheimer's%20disease&st=cse
>>
>> Another example of contradiction/refutation, this time found in
>> PubMed, is that Metformin apparently doesn't work (only) along the
>> pathways that previous research indicated:
>>
>> "Metformin inhibits hepatic gluconeogenesis in mice independently of
>> the LKB1/AMPK pathway via a decrease in hepatic energy state"
>> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2898585/
>>
>> Has anyone seen a way to deal with conflicting information like this
>> in text mining? If we were to represent this information in RDF, could
>> we do it in such a way that we could observe the change of the
>> Metformin association with LKB1/AMPK pathways over time in the
>> literature?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Scott
>>
>> P.S. Oktie - It is pure coincidence that the first example is from
>> clinical trials. :)
>>
>> -- 
>> M. Scott Marshall, W3C HCLS IG co-chair
>> Leiden University Medical Center / University of Amsterdam
>> http://staff.science.uva.nl/~marshall
>>
>
>
>
>
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Received on Thursday, 14 October 2010 09:55:07 UTC