Linking clinotypes to phenotypes and genotypes from laboratory test results in comprehensive physical exams

Background: In this work, we aimed to demonstrate how to utilize the lab test results and other clinical information to support precision medicine research and clinical decisions on complex diseases, with the support of electronic medical record facilities. We defined "clinotypes" as clinical information that could be observed and measured objectively using biomedical instruments. From well-known 'omic' problem definitions, we defined problems using clinotype information, including stratifying patients-identifying interested sub cohorts for future studies, mining significant associations between clinotypes and specific phenotypes-diseases, and discovering potential linkages between clinotype and genomic information. We solved these problems by integrating public omic databases and applying advanced machine learning and visual analytic techniques on two-year health exam records from a large population of healthy southern Chinese individuals (size n = 91,354). When developing the solution, we carefully addressed the missing information, imbalance and non-uniformed data annotation issues.

Results: We organized the techniques and solutions to address the problems and issues above into CPA framework (Clinotype Prediction and Association-finding). At the data preprocessing step, we handled the missing value issue with predicted accuracy of 0.760. We curated 12,635 clinotype-gene associations. We found 147 Associations between 147 chronic diseases-phenotype and clinotypes, which improved the disease predictive performance to AUC (average) of 0.967. We mined 182 significant clinotype-clinotype associations among 69 clinotypes.

Conclusions: Our results showed strong potential connectivity between the omics information and the clinical lab test information. The results further emphasized the needs to utilize and integrate the clinical information, especially the lab test results, in future PheWas and omic studies. Furthermore, it showed that the clinotype information could initiate an alternative research direction and serve as an independent field of data to support the well-known 'phenome' and 'genome' researches.