Identifying disease relationships using association indices

Abstract

Understanding disease relationships is important to enhance knowledge in systems biology as well as disease diagnosis and treatment. Several studies attempt to find genes essential for diseases. However, knowledge of essential genes alone is not enough to complete understanding of disease mechanisms. Several computational methods have been developed to find relationships between diseases. These methods are widely used to support studying in systems biology. This paper reviews disease relationship metrics, named disease association indices, for identifying relationships between diseases in human, hi particular, the measurements are based on network- based approaches.