One of the most significant advancements in modern medicine has been the discovery of relationships between diseases and certain genes. These “disease genes” enable doctors to pinpoint the exact location of the disease. In 2015, a group of scientists developed an algorithm known as DIAMOnD in order to find more disease genes. DIAMOnD examines the significance of the connections between genes in a network and the set of disease genes, and then adds the most significantly connected gene to the set of disease genes. For this project, I sought to improve the performance of DIAMOnD to more accurately determine the next disease gene to be added. To do this, I changed the probability distribution used by the algorithm and tested both algorithms on certain diseases and networks.

• This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

Creator

• Specht, Kevin Brian

Publisher

• Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Identifier

• E-project-042717-040621

Advisor

• Korkin, Dmitry
• Wu, Zheyang

Year

• 2017

Date created

• 2017-04-27

Resource type

• Major Qualifying Project

Major

• Interdisciplinary

Rights statement

• In Copyright