• Question: what health conditions have you identified?

    Asked by Robyn Capes-Baldrey to Sreejita on 22 Jan 2020.
    • Photo: Sreejita Ghosh

      Sreejita Ghosh answered on 22 Jan 2020:


      There are three different pathways which adrenal hormones are responsible for.

      As the figure shows, there are a number of hormones being produced at each stage of this pathway, which when produced within a certain range, keeps the pathway running smoothly. But there are some genetic mutation which cause over-production or under-production of some of these hormones, which affect one or more of these pathways (depending on which point of the pathway the ‘rogue’ hormone is produced). These over- and under-production of hormone manifest as diseases of the group called ‘congenital adrenal hyperplasia’ (CAH), and some diseases of the group which is disorder of sex development (DSD). Right now we are investigating 6 such hormone disorders, 5 of which are CAH related, and 1 DSD; these are rare conditions but without early diagnosis babies and children die due to lack of life saving hormone injections.
      The doctors in Birmingham I collaborate with, have collected urine samples from patients and healthy subjects , performed gas Chromatography Mass Spectroscopy (GCMS) on them to extract hormones in a non-intrusive manner. These hormone profiles from 1007 subjects (healthy and sick) is one of the biggest datasets for this group of diseases.
      I keep part of the dataset from each class separated, to test my trained classifier on: this is the validation set. The other part of the dataset I use for training my classifier, to learn which group of hormones play more important role for which of the conditions, and therefore which precise part of the adrenal pathway is responsible for which of the diseases. My classifier in addition to being able to correctly identify the conditions, also creates a hormone interaction profile for each of these conditions, so that doctors can learn more about these conditions.
      On my profile page, under My Work(Read more), you can see a video which shows how these conditions are classified by my classifier. I hope I have provided some interesting information.

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