Open AccessMeasuring the importance of vertices in the weighted human disease network
Author(s) -
Seyed Mehrzad Almasi,
Ting Hu
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0205936
Subject(s) - centrality , disease , human disease , computational biology , bipartite graph , biological network , set (abstract data type) , computer science , network analysis , biology , genetics , gene , medicine , mathematics , theoretical computer science , graph , combinatorics , physics , pathology , quantum mechanics , programming language
Many human genetic disorders and diseases are known to be related to each other through frequently observed co-occurrences. Studying the correlations among multiple diseases provides an important avenue to better understand the common genetic background of diseases and to help develop new drugs that can treat multiple diseases. Meanwhile, network science has seen increasing applications on modeling complex biological systems, and can be a powerful tool to elucidate the correlations of multiple human diseases. In this article, known disease-gene associations were represented using a weighted bipartite network. We extracted a weighted human diseases network from such a bipartite network to show the correlations of diseases. Subsequently, we proposed a new centrality measurement for the weighted human disease network (WHDN) in order to quantify the importance of diseases. Using our centrality measurement to quantify the importance of vertices in WHDN, we were able to find a set of most central diseases. By investigating the 30 top diseases and their most correlated neighbors in the network, we identified disease linkages including known disease pairs and novel findings. Our research helps better understand the common genetic origin of human diseases and suggests top diseases that likely induce other related diseases.