Identifying Correlations among Biomedical Data through Information Retrieval Techniques

In recent years, the integration of researches in Computer Science and medical fields has made available to the scientific community an enormous amount of data, stored in databases. In this paper, we analyze the data available in the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI), a comprehensive observational, multi-center study designed to identify progression biomarkers important for better treatments for Parkinson's disease. The data of PPMI participants are collected through a comprehensive battery of tests and assessments including Magnetic Resonance Imaging and DATscan imaging, collection of blood, cerebral spinal fluid, and urine samples, as well as cognitive and motor evaluations. To this aim, we propose a technique to identify a correlation between the biomedical data in the PPMI dataset for verifying the consistency of medical reports formulated during the visits and allow to correctly categorize the various patients. To correlate the information of each patient's medical report, Information Retrieval techniques have been adopted, including the Latent Semantic Analysis technique suitable for constructing a concept space on patient information. Then, patients are grouped and classified into affected or not by using clustering algorithms according to the similarity of medical reports projected in the concept space. Results revealed that the proposed technique reached 95% of effectiveness in the classification of patients.