Mathematical Biology Seminar

Uncertainty Quantification for Biomedical Decision Making: A Critical Informatics Contribution to Precision Medicine

Julio Facelli Department of Biomedical Informatics University of Utah
Wednesday, Nov 8, 2017, at 3:05pm LCB 219

There is concern about the lack of reproducibility of biomedical studies, but the research community has not taken advantage of formal Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) methods to better understand this issue. Here we show the importance of UQ in Translational Science and Precision Medicine. This presentation describes the use of UQ methods in biomedical research with applications to breast cancer classification, family history risk assessment and gene co-expression network determination. The results presented here show that UQ methods can be applied to biomedical sciences. UQ provides useful clinical and translational information, and arguable UQ should become a common tool in translational science and precision medicine because UQ methods can provide a better understanding of the underlying factors leading to the lack of reproducibility.