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Biomedical and Bioinformatics Challenges to Computer Science

Article  in  Procedia Computer Science · May 2010

DOI: 10.1016/j.procs.2010.04.102 · Source: DBLP

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 Procedia Computer
Science
Procedia ComputerScience
Procedia Computer Science001(2010)
(2012) 931–933
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www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia

International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2010

Biomedical and Bioinformatics Challenges to Computer Science

Mario Cannataroa,∗, Rodrigo Weber dos Santosb , Joakim Sundnesc
a Department of Experimental Medicine and Clinic, University ”Magna Græcia” of Catanzaro, Catanzaro, Italy, and ICAR-CNR, Rende, Italy
b Department of Computer Science, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, Brazil
c Center for Biomedical Computing, Simula Research Laboratory, Lysaker, Norway

Abstract
This is the third edition of the workshop on Biomedical and Bioinformatics Challenges to Computer Science.
The purpose of the workshop series is to bring together scientists from computer science and life sciences, to discuss
current challenges in this inter-disciplinary field. A wide range of life science applications will be addressed, ranging
from classical bioinformatics to mathematical models of systems physiology.
c 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.
⃝
Keywords: Bioinformatics, modeling and simulation of biological systems, data management and integration, data
visualization

1. Introduction

Computers and computational methods play an increasingly important role in the life sciences, and currently form
an indispensable tool for a wide range of scientific applications. These range from classical bioinformatics, which
concerns with the use of computer methods in molecular biology, to numerical models of complex physiological
systems. To this date, these scientific fields have been fairly disconnected, but the situation is changing with the
increasing availability of high performance computing tools, which allows system physiology models to be developed
with more detail and realism. Existing computer models have already demonstrated direct links between gene data
and organ function, and the current development will inevitably narrow the gap between classical bioinformatics and
systems physiology modeling. The successful combination of these two fields holds a huge potential for scientific
progress, as it may represent a mechanistic link from knowledge and exploration on a molecular scale, to the function
of biological tissues, organs and organ systems. However, this large potential is paired with substantial challenges,
many of which are directly related to computer science. These include the management and integration of huge
data banks, computational resources required for solving complex multiscale mathematical models, and software
engineering issues related to development and validation of increasingly complicated software systems.
The purpose of the third workshop on Biomedical and Bioinformatics Challenges to Computer Science is to bring
together scientists from computer science, applied mathematics and a variety of branches of life sciences, to discuss
important computer science challenges.

∗ Corresponding author; cannataro@unicz.it

1877-0509 ⃝c 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.
doi:10.1016/j.procs.2010.04.102
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2. Workshop summary

The papers of the present workshop cover a broad range of applications. The first session is devoted to the
computational modeling and image processing of biomedical applications. Two papers of the first session present new
results in the area of heart modeling. The paper of Monica Hanslien and co-workers evaluates a new mathematical
technique for cardiac electrophysiology models based on ordinary differential equations. A mathematical formulation
is proposed to eliminate the discontinuities usually found in the rate functions of this kind of ionic models. As a result,
by replacing the discontinues functions with smooth versions, the numerical methods improve the order of accuracy,
and have a negligible effect on the kinetics of the ionic model.
The paper from James Southern and co-workers presents a new mesh adaptivity technique for the solution of the
cardiac Bidomain equations, a non-linear system of partial differential equations that models the propagation of action
potentials in cardiac tissue. The new mesh adaptivity algorithm offers a reduction in the number of degrees of freedom
of the system to be solved by an order of magnitude during propagation and 2 orders of magnitude in the subsequent
plateau phase of action potential. As a result, a computational speedup by a factor of between 5 and 12 was obtained.
Lev Naumov and co-workers present a computational model for tumour growth based on the cellular automata
technique. The model is used to generate in-silico experiments that support the study of the influence of mitoses rate
on the growth dynamics of tumour regions. The results conform with the expectations that the growth should obtain a
more exponential character if the proportion of mitotic cells inside a tumour is increasing.
Another two papers of the workshop present new computational models and image processing techniques that sup-
port the investigation of colorectal cancer. Isabel Figueiredo and co-workers present a coupled convection-diffusion
level set model for tracking epithelial cells in colonic crypts that can support in-silico investigations of colorectal
cancer. The level set equation tracks the location and shape of an epithelial cell set, inside the crypt, whereas the
interfacial velocity of the epithelial cell set is obtained from a convection-diffusion type equation.
Xuemin Liu and co-workers propose a new procedure based on image processing techniques to automatically
measure the quality of mucosa inspection for colonoscopy. Colonoscopy is currently the preferred screening modality
for prevention of colorectal cancer. However, the effectiveness of colonoscopy depends on the quality of the procedure
and on several factors. In the paper, new methods are presented and a new quality metric is proposed for routine
colonoscopy screening.
The papers of the second session focus on the application of computer science tools on genetics, molecular biology
and clinical data. The first two papers discuss how the application of advanced data management techniques, such
as geographical databases and ontology-based annotations, may improve the effectiveness of querying biological and
clinical data
Giuseppe Tradigo and co-workers apply spatial databases techniques to clinical data representing the health status
of a large population. Clinical data are first geocoded by associating tuples related to some geographical position
with the coordinates of a map and then analyzed and queried using both SQL-like languages and a graphical user
interface. Several experiments have been performed using data related to an Italian district which have been furnished
by an association of family doctors and patients. Queries performed on geocoded data allow to relate health data with
patient locations and in particular they allow to highlight geographic distribution of diseases or to discover relations
among diseases and points of interest.
Pietro Hiram Guzzi and co-workers present a software framework able to annotate existing PPI databases with
concepts extracted by ontologies that may be used to query the database. The framework merges PPI data with
annotations extracted from Gene Ontology, then a semantic-based query interface enables users to query these data
by using the biological concepts coded in Gene Ontology. This allows for instance to query interacting proteins
depending on their biological functions, processes or compartments.
Dagman Iber discusses how to reduce the complexity of models for cellular signaling networks. Models for
biological signaling comprise a large number of variables and parameters to achieve predictive power, and involve
many states related to the formation of (allosteric) complexes. This problem is of combinatorial complexity. These
models are, in general, too complex to achieve an intuitive understanding. The author suggests a 2-step process
to reduce the complexity of these models. In a first step a large detailed model is developed and tested based on
experimental data. In a second step the detailed information obtained from the validated model is used to develop a
realistic phenomenological model.
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Finally, Alexander V. Spirov and David M. Holloway present a new approach to design a dynamic model of genes
with multiple autonomous regulatory modules through evolutionary computations. The approach is based on Genetic
Algorithms (GA), with new crossover operators especially designed for these purposes. The new operators use local
homology between parental strings to preserve building blocks found by the algorithm. Such an approach is applied
to two real-life Systems Biology problems and the effectiveness of the proposed method with respect to standard GA
is presented.

3. Conclusion and outlook

The topics addressed in this section represent a wide range of scientific fields, but the contributions can largely
be divided into two groups. These groups can be related to the physical scales considered; classical bioinformatics
applications concerning the molecular scale, and systems physiology models operating on the scale of organs and
organ systems. Although the physiology models typically link down to the cell level, there is still a gap between this
field and the classical bioinformatics field, both in physical scales and in scientific tools and modeling approaches.
As noted in the previous editions of the workshop [1, 2], a goal for the present workshop series is to increase the
interactions between these two branches of science, potentially leading to extremely promising collaborative research
projects.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the members of the program committee for the invaluable assistance on reviewing the
papers and the organizers of ICCS for promoting this workshop.

References
[1] M. Cannataro, M. Romberg, J. Sundnes, R. W. dos Santos, Bioinformatics’ challenges to computer science, in: M. Bubak, G. D. van Albada,
J. Dongarra, P. M. A. Sloot (Eds.), ICCS (3), Vol. 5103 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, 2008, pp. 67–69.
[2] M. Cannataro, R. W. dos Santos, J. Sundnes, Bioinformatics’ challenges to computer science: Bioinformatics tools and biomedical modeling,
in: G. Allen, J. Nabrzyski, E. Seidel, G. D. van Albada, J. Dongarra, P. M. A. Sloot (Eds.), ICCS (1), Vol. 5544 of Lecture Notes in Computer
Science, Springer, 2009, pp. 807–809.

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