Unsupervised assessment of microarray data quality using a Gaussian mixture model

Data reduction and data visualization for automatic diagnosis using gene expression and clinical data

Accurate diagnoses of specific diseases require, in general, the review of the whole medical history of a patient. Currently, even though many advances have been made for disease monitoring, domain experts are still requested to perform direct analyses in order to get a precise classification, thus implying significant efforts and costs. In this work we present a framework for automated diagnosis based on high-dimensional gene expression and clinical data. Given that high-dimensional data can be difficult to analyze and computationally expensive to process, we first perform data reduction to transform high-dimensional representations of data into a lower dimensional space, yet keeping them meaningful for our purposes. We used then different data visualization techniques to embed complex pieces of information in 2-D images, that are in turn used to perform diagnosis relying on deep learning approaches. Experimental analyses show that the proposed method achieves good performance, featuring a prediction Recall value between 91% and 99%.

HDAC2-dependent Antipsychotic-like Effects of Chronic Treatment with the HDAC Inhibitor SAHA in Mice

Antipsychotic drugs, including both typical such as haloperidol and atypical such as clozapine, remain the current standard for schizophrenia treatment. These agents are relatively effective in treating hallucinations and delusions. However, cognitive deficits are at present essentially either persistent or exacerbated following chronic antipsychotic drug exposure. This underlines the need of new therapeutic approaches to improve cognition in treated schizophrenia patients. Our previous findings suggested that upregulation of histone deacetylase 2 (HDAC2) expression upon chronic antipsychotic treatment may lead to negative effects on cognition and cortical synaptic structure. Here we tested different phenotypes of psychosis, synaptic plasticity, cognition and antipsychotic drug action in HDAC2 conditional knockout (HDAC2-cKO) mice and controls. Conditional depletion of HDAC2 function in glutamatergic pyramidal neurons led to a protective phenotype against behavior models induced by psychedelic and dissociative drugs, such as DOI and MK801, respectively. Immunoreactivity toward synaptophysin, which labels presynaptic terminals of functional synapses, was decreased in the frontal cortex of control mice chronically treated with clozapine - an opposite effect occurred in HDAC2-cKO mice. Chronic treatment with the class I and class II HDAC inhibitor SAHA prevented via HDAC2 the disruptive effects of MK801 on recognition memory. Additionally, chronic SAHA treatment affected transcription of numerous plasticity-related genes in the frontal cortex of control mice, an effect that was not observed in HDAC2-cKO animals. Together, these findings suggest that HDAC2 may represent a novel target to improve synaptic plasticity and cognition in treated schizophrenia patients.