TY - CHAP A1 - Maignant, Elodie A1 - Conrad, Tim A1 - von Tycowicz, Christoph T1 - Tree inference with varifold distances T2 - Geometric Science of Information. GSI 2025 N2 - In this paper, we consider a tree inference problem motivated by the critical problem in single-cell genomics of reconstructing dynamic cellular processes from sequencing data. In particular, given a population of cells sampled from such a process, we are interested in the problem of ordering the cells according to their progression in the process. This is known as trajectory inference. If the process is differentiation, this amounts to reconstructing the corresponding differentiation tree. One way of doing this in practice is to estimate the shortest-path distance between nodes based on cell similarities observed in sequencing data. Recent sequencing techniques make it possible to measure two types of data: gene expression levels, and RNA velocity, a vector that predicts changes in gene expression. The data then consist of a discrete vector field on a (subset of a) Euclidean space of dimension equal to the number of genes under consideration. By integrating this velocity field, we trace the evolution of gene expression levels in each single cell from some initial stage to its current stage. Eventually, we assume that we have a faithful embedding of the differentiation tree in a Euclidean space, but which we only observe through the curves representing the paths from the root to the nodes. Using varifold distances between such curves, we define a similarity measure between nodes which we prove approximates the shortest-path distance in a tree that is isomorphic to the target tree. Y1 - 2025 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-03921-7_30 VL - 16034 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Melnyk, Kateryna A1 - Weimann, Kuba A1 - Conrad, Tim T1 - Understanding microbiome dynamics via interpretable graph representation learning JF - Scientific Reports N2 - Large-scale perturbations in the microbiome constitution are strongly correlated, whether as a driver or a consequence, with the health and functioning of human physiology. However, understanding the difference in the microbiome profiles of healthy and ill individuals can be complicated due to the large number of complex interactions among microbes. We propose to model these interactions as a time-evolving graph whose nodes are microbes and edges are interactions among them. Motivated by the need to analyse such complex interactions, we develop a method that learns a low-dimensional representation of the time-evolving graph and maintains the dynamics occurring in the high-dimensional space. Through our experiments, we show that we can extract graph features such as clusters of nodes or edges that have the highest impact on the model to learn the low-dimensional representation. This information can be crucial to identify microbes and interactions among them that are strongly correlated with clinical diseases. We conduct our experiments on both synthetic and real-world microbiome datasets. Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-29098-7 VL - 13 SP - 2058 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Liang, YongTian A1 - Piao, Chengji A1 - Beuschel, Christine B. A1 - Toppe, David A1 - Kollipara, Laxmikanth A1 - Bogdanow, Boris A1 - Maglione, Marta A1 - Lützkendorf, Janine A1 - See, Jason Chun Kit A1 - Huang, Sheng A1 - Conrad, Tim A1 - Kintscher, Ulrich A1 - Madeo, Frank A1 - Liu, Fan A1 - Sickmann, Albert A1 - Sigrist, Stephan J. T1 - eIF5A hypusination, boosted by dietary spermidine, protects from premature brain aging and mitochondrial dysfunction JF - Cell Reports Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2021.108941 VL - 35 IS - 2 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Melnyk, Kateryna A1 - Montavon, Grègoire A1 - Klus, Stefan A1 - Conrad, Tim T1 - Graph Kernel Koopman Embedding for Human Microbiome Analysis JF - Applied Network Science N2 - More and more diseases have been found to be strongly correlated with disturbances in the microbiome constitution, e.g., obesity, diabetes, or some cancer types. Thanks to modern high-throughput omics technologies, it becomes possible to directly analyze human microbiome and its influence on the health status. Microbial communities are monitored over long periods of time and the associations between their members are explored. These relationships can be described by a time-evolving graph. In order to understand responses of the microbial community members to a distinct range of perturbations such as antibiotics exposure or diseases and general dynamical properties, the time-evolving graph of the human microbial communities has to be analyzed. This becomes especially challenging due to dozens of complex interactions among microbes and metastable dynamics. The key to solving this problem is the representation of the time-evolving graphs as fixed-length feature vectors preserving the original dynamics. We propose a method for learning the embedding of the time-evolving graph that is based on the spectral analysis of transfer operators and graph kernels. We demonstrate that our method can capture temporary changes in the time-evolving graph on both synthetic data and real-world data. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the method. Furthermore, we show that our method can be applied to human microbiome data to study dynamic processes. Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-020-00339-2 VL - 5 IS - 96 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Iravani, Sahar A1 - Conrad, Tim T1 - An Interpretable Deep Learning Approach for Biomarker Detection in LC-MS Proteomics Data JF - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics N2 - Analyzing mass spectrometry-based proteomics data with deep learning (DL) approaches poses several challenges due to the high dimensionality, low sample size, and high level of noise. Additionally, DL-based workflows are often hindered to be integrated into medical settings due to the lack of interpretable explanation. We present DLearnMS, a DL biomarker detection framework, to address these challenges on proteomics instances of liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) - a well-established tool for quantifying complex protein mixtures. Our DLearnMS framework learns the clinical state of LC-MS data instances using convolutional neural networks. Based on the trained neural networks, we show how biomarkers can be identified using layer-wise relevance propagation. This enables detecting discriminating regions of the data and the design of more robust networks. One of the main advantages over other established methods is that no explicit preprocessing step is needed in our DLearnMS framework. Our evaluation shows that DLearnMS outperforms conventional LC-MS biomarker detection approaches in identifying fewer false positive peaks while maintaining a comparable amount of true positives peaks. Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/tcbb.2022.3141656 VL - 20 IS - 1 SP - 151 EP - 161 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Rams, Mona A1 - Conrad, Tim T1 - Dictionary learning allows model-free pseudotime estimation of transcriptomics data JF - BMC Genomics Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-021-08276-9 VL - 23 PB - BioMed Central ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Weimann, K. A1 - Conrad, Tim T1 - Transfer Learning for ECG Classification JF - Scientific Reports N2 - Remote monitoring devices, which can be worn or implanted, have enabled a more effective healthcare for patients with periodic heart arrhythmia due to their ability to constantly monitor heart activity. However, these devices record considerable amounts of electrocardiogram (ECG) data that needs to be interpreted by physicians. Therefore, there is a growing need to develop reliable methods for automatic ECG interpretation to assist the physicians. Here, we use deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) to classify raw ECG recordings. However, training CNNs for ECG classification often requires a large number of annotated samples, which are expensive to acquire. In this work, we tackle this problem by using transfer learning. First, we pretrain CNNs on the largest public data set of continuous raw ECG signals. Next, we finetune the networks on a small data set for classification of Atrial Fibrillation, which is the most common heart arrhythmia. We show that pretraining improves the performance of CNNs on the target task by up to 6.57%, effectively reducing the number of annotations required to achieve the same performance as CNNs that are not pretrained. We investigate both supervised as well as unsupervised pretraining approaches, which we believe will increase in relevance, since they do not rely on the expensive ECG annotations. The code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/kweimann/ecg-transfer-learning. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-84374-8 VL - 11 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Le Duc, Huy A1 - Conrad, Tim T1 - A light-weight and highly flexible software system for analyzing large bio-medical datasets JF - Future Generation Computer Systems Y1 - 2020 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Juds, Carmen A1 - Schmidt, Johannes A1 - Weller, Michael A1 - Lange, Thorid A1 - Conrad, Tim A1 - Boerner, Hans T1 - Combining Phage Display and Next-generation Sequencing for Materials Sciences: A Case Study on Probing Polypropylene Surfaces JF - Journal of the American Chemical Society N2 - Phage display biopanning with Illumina next-generation sequencing (NGS) is applied to reveal insights into peptide-based adhesion domains for polypropylene (PP). One biopanning round followed by NGS selects robust PP-binding peptides that are not evident by Sanger sequencing. NGS provides a significant statistical base that enables motif analysis, statistics on positional residue depletion/enrichment, and data analysis to suppress false-positive sequences from amplification bias. The selected sequences are employed as water-based primers for PP?metal adhesion to condition PP surfaces and increase adhesive strength by 100\% relative to nonprimed PP. Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.0c03482 VL - 142 IS - 24 SP - 10624 EP - 10628 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Cvetkovic, Nada A1 - Conrad, Tim A1 - Lie, Han Cheng T1 - A Convergent Discretisation Method for Transition Path Theory for Diffusion Processes JF - Multiscale Modeling & Simulation Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1137/20M1329354 VL - 19 IS - 1 SP - 242 EP - 266 PB - Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Tuncay, Erhun Giray A1 - Erdur, Rıza Cenk A1 - Conrad, Tim T1 - Parallel Exchange of Randomized SubGraphs for Optimization of Network Alignment: PERSONA JF - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics N2 - The aim of Network Alignment in Protein-Protein Interaction Networks is discovering functionally similar regions between compared organisms. One major compromise for solving a network alignment problem is the trade-off among multiple similarity objectives while applying an alignment strategy. An alignment may lose its biological relevance while favoring certain objectives upon others due to the actual relevance of unfavored objectives. One possible solution for solving this issue may be blending the stronger aspects of various alignment strategies until achieving mature solutions. This study proposes a parallel approach called PERSONA that allows aligners to share their partial solutions continuously while they progress. All these aligners pursue their particular heuristics as part of a particle swarm that searches for multi-objective solutions of the same alignment problem in a reactive actor environment. The actors use the stronger portion of a solution as a subgraph that they receive from leading or other actors and send their own stronger subgraphs back upon evaluation of those partial solutions. Moreover, the individual heuristics of each actor takes randomized parameter values at each cycle of parallel execution so that the problem search space can thoroughly be investigated. The results achieved with PERSONA are remarkably optimized and balanced for both topological and node similarity objectives. Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/TCBB.2022.3231489 VL - 20 IS - 3 SP - 2064 EP - 2077 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Alchikh, Maren A1 - Conrad, Tim A1 - Obermeier, Patrick A1 - Ma, Xiaolin A1 - Schweiger, Brunhilde A1 - Opota, Onya A1 - Rath, Barbara T1 - Disease Burden and Inpatient Management of Children with Acute Respiratory Viral Infections during the Pre-COVID Era in Germany: A Cost-of-Illness Study JF - Viruses N2 - Respiratory viral infections (RVIs) are common reasons for healthcare consultations. The inpatient management of RVIs consumes significant resources. From 2009 to 2014, we assessed the costs of RVI management in 4776 hospitalized children aged 0–18 years participating in a quality improvement program, where all ILI patients underwent virologic testing at the National Reference Centre followed by detailed recording of their clinical course. The direct (medical or non-medical) and indirect costs of inpatient management outside the ICU (‘non-ICU’) versus management requiring ICU care (‘ICU’) added up to EUR 2767.14 (non-ICU) vs. EUR 29,941.71 (ICU) for influenza, EUR 2713.14 (non-ICU) vs. EUR 16,951.06 (ICU) for RSV infections, and EUR 2767.33 (non-ICU) vs. EUR 14,394.02 (ICU) for human rhinovirus (hRV) infections, respectively. Non-ICU inpatient costs were similar for all eight RVIs studied: influenza, RSV, hRV, adenovirus (hAdV), metapneumovirus (hMPV), parainfluenza virus (hPIV), bocavirus (hBoV), and seasonal coronavirus (hCoV) infections. ICU costs for influenza, however, exceeded all other RVIs. At the time of the study, influenza was the only RVI with antiviral treatment options available for children, but only 9.8% of influenza patients (non-ICU) and 1.5% of ICU patients with influenza received antivirals; only 2.9% were vaccinated. Future studies should investigate the economic impact of treatment and prevention of influenza, COVID-19, and RSV post vaccine introduction. Y1 - 2024 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/v16040507 VL - 16 IS - 4 ER -