Combination of Expert Guidelines-based and Machine Learning-based Approaches Leads to Superior Accuracy of Automated Prediction of Clinical Effect of Copy Number Variations (original) (raw)

SCIP: software for efficient clinical interpretation of copy number variants detected by whole-genome sequencing

Human Genetics

Copy number variants (CNVs) represent major etiologic factors in rare genetic diseases. Current clinical CNV interpretation workflows require extensive back-and-forth with multiple tools and databases. This increases complexity and time burden, potentially resulting in missed genetic diagnoses. We present the Suite for CNV Interpretation and Prioritization (SCIP), a software package for the clinical interpretation of CNVs detected by whole-genome sequencing (WGS). The SCIP Visualization Module near-instantaneously displays all information necessary for CNV interpretation (variant quality, population frequency, inheritance pattern, and clinical relevance) on a single page—supported by modules providing variant filtration and prioritization. SCIP was comprehensively evaluated using WGS data from 1027 families with congenital cardiac disease and/or autism spectrum disorder, containing 187 pathogenic or likely pathogenic (P/LP) CNVs identified in previous curations. SCIP was efficient i...

ClinSV: clinical grade structural and copy number variant detection from whole genome sequencing data

Genome Medicine, 2021

Whole genome sequencing (WGS) has the potential to outperform clinical microarrays for the detection of structural variants (SV) including copy number variants (CNVs), but has been challenged by high false positive rates. Here we present ClinSV, a WGS based SV integration, annotation, prioritization, and visualization framework, which identified 99.8% of simulated pathogenic ClinVar CNVs > 10 kb and 11/11 pathogenic variants from matched microarrays. The false positive rate was low (1.5–4.5%) and reproducibility high (95–99%). In clinical practice, ClinSV identified reportable variants in 22 of 485 patients (4.7%) of which 35–63% were not detectable by current clinical microarray designs. ClinSV is available at https://github.com/KCCG/ClinSV.

Copy Number Variation: Methods and Clinical Applications

Applied Sciences

Gains and losses of large segments of genomic DNA, known as copy number variants (CNVs) gained considerable interest in clinical diagnostics lately, as particular forms may lead to inherited genetic diseases. In recent decades, researchers developed a wide variety of cytogenetic and molecular methods with different detection capabilities to detect clinically relevant CNVs. In this review, we summarize methodological progress from conventional approaches to current state of the art techniques capable of detecting CNVs from a few bases up to several megabases. Although the recent rapid progress of sequencing methods has enabled precise detection of CNVs, determining their functional effect on cellular and whole-body physiology remains a challenge. Here, we provide a comprehensive list of databases and bioinformatics tools that may serve as useful assets for researchers, laboratory diagnosticians, and clinical geneticists facing the challenge of CNV detection and interpretation.

Skyhawk: An Artificial Neural Network-based discriminator for reviewing clinically significant genomic variants: Supplementary Materials

2018

Motivation: Many rare diseases and cancers are fundamentally diseases of the genome. In the past several years, genome sequencing has become one of the most important tools in clinical practice for rare disease diagnosis and targeted cancer therapy. However, variant interpretation remains the bottleneck as is not yet automated and may take a specialist several hours of work per patient. On average, one-fifth of this time is spent on visually confirming the authenticity of the candidate variants. Results: We developed Skyhawk, an artificial neural network-based discriminator that mimics the process of expert review on clinically significant genomics variants. Skyhawk runs in less than one minute to review ten thousand variants, and about 30 minutes to review all variants in a typical whole-genome sequencing sample. Among the false positive singletons identified by GATK HaplotypeCaller, UnifiedGenotyper and 16GT in the HG005 GIAB sample, 79.7% were rejected by Skyhawk. Worked on the V...