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This editorial introduces Source Code for Biology and Medicine, a new journal for publication of programming source code used in biology and medicine. Source Code for Biology and Medicine is an open access independent journal published by BioMed Central. We describe the journal aims, scope, benefits of open access, article processing charges, competing interests, content and article format, peer review policy and publication, and introduce the Editorial Board.
Studying complex biological systems in a holistic rather than a "one gene or one protein" at a time approach requires the concerted effort of scientists from a wide variety of disciplines. The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) has seamlessly integrated these disparate fields to create a cross-disciplinary platform and culture in which "biology drives technology drives computation." To achieve this platform/culture, it has been necessary for cross-disciplinary ISB scientists to learn one another's languages and work together effectively in teams. The focus of this "systems" approach on disease has led to a discipline denoted systems medicine. The advent of technological breakthroughs in the fields of genomics, proteomics, and, indeed, the other "omics" is catalyzing striking advances in systems medicine that have and are transforming diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. Systems medicine has united genomics and genetics through family genomics to more readily identify disease genes. It has made blood a window into health and disease. It is leading to the stratification of diseases (division into discrete subtypes) for proper impedance match against drugs and the stratification of patients into subgroups that respond to environmental challenges in a similar manner (e.g. response to drugs, response to toxins, etc.). The convergence of patient-activated social networks, big data and their analytics, and systems medicine has led to a P4 medicine that is predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory. Medicine will focus on each individual. It will become proactive in nature. It will increasingly focus on wellness rather than disease. For example, in 10 years each patient will be surrounded by a virtual cloud of billions of data points, and we will have the tools to reduce this enormous data dimensionality into simple hypotheses about how to optimize wellness and avoid disease for each individual. P4 medicine will be able to detect and treat perturbations in healthy individuals long before disease symptoms appear, thus optimizing the wellness of individuals and avoiding disease. P4 medicine will 1) improve health care, 2) reduce the cost of health care, and 3) stimulate innovation and new company creation. Health care is not the only subject that can benefit from such integrative, cross-disciplinary, and systems-driven platforms and cultures. Many other challenges plaguing our planet, such as energy, environment, nutrition, and agriculture can be transformed by using such an integrated and systems-driven approach.
Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) and their specialized variants, particularly Code LLMs, have recently delivered impressive performance. However, previous Code LLMs are typically fine-tuned on single-source data with limited quality and diversity, which may insufficiently elicit the potential of pre-trained Code LLMs. In this paper, we present AlchemistCoder, a series of Code LLMs with enhanced code generation and generalization capabilities fine-tuned on multi-source data. To achieve this, we pioneer to unveil inherent conflicts among the various styles and qualities in multi-source code corpora and introduce data-specific prompts with hindsight relabeling, termed AlchemistPrompts, to harmonize different data sources and instruction-response pairs. Additionally, we propose incorporating the data construction process into the fine-tuning data as code comprehension tasks, including instruction evolution, data filtering, and code review. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AlchemistCoder holds a clear lead among all models of the same size (6.7B/7B) and rivals or even surpasses larger models (15B/33B/70B), showcasing the efficacy of our method in refining instruction-follo
BACKGROUND: Variable importance measures for random forests have been receiving increased attention as a means of variable selection in many classification tasks in bioinformatics and related scientific fields, for instance to select a subset of genetic markers relevant for the prediction of a certain disease. We show that random forest variable importance measures are a sensible means for variable selection in many applications, but are not reliable in situations where potential predictor variables vary in their scale of measurement or their number of categories. This is particularly important in genomics and computational biology, where predictors often include variables of different types, for example when predictors include both sequence data and continuous variables such as folding energy, or when amino acid sequence data show different numbers of categories. RESULTS: Simulation studies are presented illustrating that, when random forest variable importance measures are used with data of varying types, the results are misleading because suboptimal predictor variables may be artificially preferred in variable selection. The two mechanisms underlying this deficiency are biased variable selection in the individual classification trees used to build the random forest on one hand, and effects induced by bootstrap sampling with replacement on the other hand. CONCLUSION: We propose to employ an alternative implementation of random forests, that provides unbiased variable selection in the individual classification trees. When this method is applied using subsampling without replacement, the resulting variable importance measures can be used reliably for variable selection even in situations where the potential predictor variables vary in their scale of measurement or their number of categories. The usage of both random forest algorithms and their variable importance measures in the R system for statistical computing is illustrated and documented thoroughly in an application re-analyzing data from a study on RNA editing. Therefore the suggested method can be applied straightforwardly by scientists in bioinformatics research.
Two key contributions presented in this paper are: i) A method for building a dataset containing source code features extracted from source files taken from Open Source Software (OSS) and associated bug reports, ii) A predictive model for estimating defectiveness of a given source code. These artifacts can be useful for building tools and techniques pertaining to several automated software engineering areas such as bug localization, code review, and recommendation and program repair. In order to achieve our goal, we first extract coding style information (e.g. related to programming language constructs used in the source code) for source code files present on GitHub. Then the information available in bug reports (if any) associated with these source code files are extracted. Thus fetched un(/ semi)-structured information is then transformed into a structured knowledge base. We considered more than 30400 source code files from 20 different GitHub repositories with about 14950 associated bug reports across 4 bug tracking portals. The source code files considered are written in four programming languages (viz., C, C++, Java, and Python) and belong to different types of applications. A
Researches have shown that most effort of today's software development is maintenance and evolution. Developers often use integrated development environments, debuggers, and tools for code search, testing, and program understanding to reduce the tedious tasks. One way to make software development more efficient is to make the program more readable. There have been many approaches proposed and developed for this purpose. Among these approaches, comment generation for source code is gaining more and more attention and has become a popular research area. In this paper, the state of art in comment generation research area are summarized and the challenges and future opportunities are discussed.
Medical image analysis plays a key role in precision medicine as it allows the clinicians to identify anatomical abnormalities and it is routinely used in clinical assessment. Data curation and pre-processing of medical images are critical steps in the quantitative medical image analysis that can have a significant impact on the resulting model performance. In this paper, we introduce a precision-medicine-toolbox that allows researchers to perform data curation, image pre-processing and handcrafted radiomics extraction (via Pyradiomics) and feature exploration tasks with Python. With this open-source solution, we aim to address the data preparation and exploration problem, bridge the gap between the currently existing packages, and improve the reproducibility of quantitative medical imaging research.
Recently, automatic code comment generation is proposed to facilitate program comprehension. Existing code comment generation techniques focus on describing the functionality of the source code. However, there are other aspects such as insights about quality or issues of the code, which are overlooked by earlier approaches. In this paper, we describe a mining approach that recommends insightful comments about the quality, deficiencies or scopes for further improvement of the source code. First, we conduct an exploratory study that motivates crowdsourced knowledge from Stack Overflow discussions as a potential resource for source code comment recommendation. Second, based on the findings from the exploratory study, we propose a heuristic-based technique for mining insightful comments from Stack Overflow Q & A site for source code comment recommendation. Experiments with 292 Stack Overflow code segments and 5,039 discussion comments show that our approach has a promising recall of 85.42%. We also conducted a complementary user study which confirms the accuracy and usefulness of the recommended comments.
Understanding the biological mechanisms of disease is crucial for medicine, and in particular, for drug discovery. AI-powered analysis of genome-scale biological data holds great potential in this regard. The increasing availability of single-cell RNA sequencing data has enabled the development of large foundation models for disease biology. However, existing foundation models only modestly improve over task-specific models in downstream applications. Here, we explored two avenues for improving single-cell foundation models. First, we scaled the pre-training data to a diverse collection of 116 million cells, which is larger than those used by previous models. Second, we leveraged the availability of large-scale biological annotations as a form of supervision during pre-training. We trained the \model family of models comprising six transformer-based state-of-the-art single-cell foundation models with 70 million, 160 million, and 400 million parameters. We vetted our models on several downstream evaluation tasks, including identifying the underlying disease state of held-out donors not seen during training, distinguishing between diseased and healthy cells for disease conditions and
Understanding the mechanisms of interactions within cells, tissues, and organisms is crucial to driving developments across biology and medicine. Mathematical modeling is an essential tool for simulating biological systems and revealing biochemical regulatory mechanisms. Building on experiments, mechanistic models are widely used to describe small-scale intracellular networks and uncover biochemical mechanisms in healthy and diseased states. The rapid development of high-throughput sequencing techniques and computational tools has recently enabled models that span multiple scales, often integrating signaling, gene regulatory, and metabolic networks. These multiscale models enable comprehensive investigations of cellular networks and thus reveal previously unknown disease mechanisms and pharmacological interventions. Here, we review systems biology models from classical mechanistic models to larger, multiscale models that integrate multiple layers of cellular networks. We introduce several examples of models of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, exercise, and cancer cell proliferation. Additionally, we discuss methods that increase the certainty and accuracy of model predictions. Integrat
New technologies have enabled the investigation of biology and human health at an unprecedented scale and in multiple dimensions. These dimensions include a myriad of properties describing genome, epigenome, transcriptome, microbiome, phenotype, and lifestyle. No single data type, however, can capture the complexity of all the factors relevant to understanding a phenomenon such as a disease. Integrative methods that combine data from multiple technologies have thus emerged as critical statistical and computational approaches. The key challenge in developing such approaches is the identification of effective models to provide a comprehensive and relevant systems view. An ideal method can answer a biological or medical question, identifying important features and predicting outcomes, by harnessing heterogeneous data across several dimensions of biological variation. In this Review, we describe the principles of data integration and discuss current methods and available implementations. We provide examples of successful data integration in biology and medicine. Finally, we discuss current challenges in biomedical integrative methods and our perspective on the future development of the
Computational biology continues to spread into new fields, becoming more accessible to researchers trained in the wet lab who are eager to take advantage of growing datasets, falling costs, and novel assays that present new opportunities for discovery even outside of the much-discussed developments in artificial intelligence. However, guidance for implementing these techniques is much easier to find than guidance for reporting their use, leaving biologists to guess which details and files are relevant. Here, we provide a set of recommendations for sharing code, with an eye toward guiding those who are comparatively new to applying open science principles to their computational work. Additionally, we review existing literature on the topic, summarize the most common tips, and evaluate the code-sharing policies of the most influential journals in biology, which occasionally encourage code-sharing but seldom require it. Taken together, we provide a user manual for biologists who seek to follow code-sharing best practices but are unsure where to start.
We introduce QiboAgent, a reference implementation designed to serve as a practitioner's guideline for developing specialized coding assistants in Quantum Computing middleware. Addressing the limitations in scientific software development of general-purpose proprietary models, we explore how lightweight, open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) provided with a custom workflow architecture compare. In detail, we experiment with two complementary paradigms: a Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipeline for high-precision information retrieval, and an autonomous agentic workflow for complex software engineering tasks. We observe that this hybrid approach significantly reduces hallucination rates in code generation compared to a proprietary baseline, achieving a peak accuracy of 90.2% with relatively small open-source models of size up to 30B parameters. Furthermore, the agentic framework exhibits advanced coding capabilities, automating the resolution of maintenance issues and new features requests, or by prototyping larger-scale refactors of the codebase, such as producing a compiled Rust module with bindings of an original pure python package, Qibo in our case. The LLM workflows used fo
Medicine, including fields in healthcare and life sciences, has seen a flurry of quantum-related activities and experiments in the last few years (although biology and quantum theory have arguably been entangled ever since Schrödinger's cat). The initial focus was on biochemical and computational biology problems; recently, however, clinical and medical quantum solutions have drawn increasing interest. The rapid emergence of quantum computing in health and medicine necessitates a mapping of the landscape. In this review, clinical and medical proof-of-concept quantum computing applications are outlined and put into perspective. These consist of over 40 experimental and theoretical studies. The use case areas span genomics, clinical research and discovery, diagnostics, and treatments and interventions. Quantum machine learning (QML) in particular has rapidly evolved and shown to be competitive with classical benchmarks in recent medical research. Near-term QML algorithms have been trained with diverse clinical and real-world data sets. This includes studies in generating new molecular entities as drug candidates, diagnosing based on medical image classification, predicting patient pe
We survey and introduce concepts and tools located at the intersection of information theory and network biology. We show that Shannon's information entropy, compressibility and algorithmic complexity quantify different local and global aspects of synthetic and biological data. We show examples such as the emergence of giant components in Erdos-Renyi random graphs, and the recovery of topological properties from numerical kinetic properties simulating gene expression data. We provide exact theoretical calculations, numerical approximations and error estimations of entropy, algorithmic probability and Kolmogorov complexity for different types of graphs, characterizing their variant and invariant properties. We introduce formal definitions of complexity for both labeled and unlabeled graphs and prove that the Kolmogorov complexity of a labeled graph is a good approximation of its unlabeled Kolmogorov complexity and thus a robust definition of graph complexity.
Model Medicine is the science of understanding, diagnosing, treating, and preventing disorders in AI models, grounded in the principle that AI models -- like biological organisms -- have internal structures, dynamic processes, heritable traits, observable symptoms, classifiable conditions, and treatable states. This paper introduces Model Medicine as a research program, bridging the gap between current AI interpretability research (anatomical observation) and the systematic clinical practice that complex AI systems increasingly require. We present five contributions: (1) a discipline taxonomy organizing 15 subdisciplines across four divisions -- Basic Model Sciences, Clinical Model Sciences, Model Public Health, and Model Architectural Medicine; (2) the Four Shell Model (v3.3), a behavioral genetics framework empirically grounded in 720 agents and 24,923 decisions from the Agora-12 program, explaining how model behavior emerges from Core--Shell interaction; (3) Neural MRI (Model Resonance Imaging), a working open-source diagnostic tool mapping five medical neuroimaging modalities to AI interpretability techniques, validated through four clinical cases demonstrating imaging, compari
A source code difference (diff) indicates changes made by comparing new and old source codes, and it can be utilized in code reviews to help developers understand the changes made to the code. Although many diff generation methods have been proposed, existing automatic methods may generate nonoptimal diffs, hindering reviewers from understanding the changes. In this paper, we propose an interactive approach to optimize diffs. Users can provide feedback for the points of a diff that should not be matched but are or parts that should be matched but are not. The edit graph is updated based on this feedback, enabling users to obtain a more optimal diff. We simulated our proposed method by applying a search algorithm to empirically assess the number of feedback instances required and the amount of diff optimization resulting from the feedback to investigate the potential of this approach. The results of 23 GitHub projects confirm that 92% of nonoptimal diffs can be addressed with less than four feedback actions in the ideal case.
The last decade has seen an explosion in models that describe phenomena in systems medicine. Such models are especially useful for studying signaling pathways, such as the Wnt pathway. In this chapter we use the Wnt pathway to showcase current mathematical and statistical techniques that enable modelers to gain insight into (models of) gene regulation, and generate testable predictions. We introduce a range of modeling frameworks, but focus on ordinary differential equation (ODE) models since they remain the most widely used approach in systems biology and medicine and continue to offer great potential. We present methods for the analysis of a single model, comprising applications of standard dynamical systems approaches such as nondimensionalization, steady state, asymptotic and sensitivity analysis, and more recent statistical and algebraic approaches to compare models with data. We present parameter estimation and model comparison techniques, focusing on Bayesian analysis and coplanarity via algebraic geometry. Our intention is that this (non exhaustive) review may serve as a useful starting point for the analysis of models in systems medicine.
IMPORTANCE: Definitions of sepsis and septic shock were last revised in 2001. Considerable advances have since been made into the pathobiology (changes in organ function, morphology, cell biology, biochemistry, immunology, and circulation), management, and epidemiology of sepsis, suggesting the need for reexamination. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate and, as needed, update definitions for sepsis and septic shock. PROCESS: A task force (n = 19) with expertise in sepsis pathobiology, clinical trials, and epidemiology was convened by the Society of Critical Care Medicine and the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine. Definitions and clinical criteria were generated through meetings, Delphi processes, analysis of electronic health record databases, and voting, followed by circulation to international professional societies, requesting peer review and endorsement (by 31 societies listed in the Acknowledgment). KEY FINDINGS FROM EVIDENCE SYNTHESIS: Limitations of previous definitions included an excessive focus on inflammation, the misleading model that sepsis follows a continuum through severe sepsis to shock, and inadequate specificity and sensitivity of the systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) criteria. Multiple definitions and terminologies are currently in use for sepsis, septic shock, and organ dysfunction, leading to discrepancies in reported incidence and observed mortality. The task force concluded the term severe sepsis was redundant. RECOMMENDATIONS: Sepsis should be defined as life-threatening organ dysfunction caused by a dysregulated host response to infection. For clinical operationalization, organ dysfunction can be represented by an increase in the Sequential [Sepsis-related] Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score of 2 points or more, which is associated with an in-hospital mortality greater than 10%. Septic shock should be defined as a subset of sepsis in which particularly profound circulatory, cellular, and metabolic abnormalities are associated with a greater risk of mortality than with sepsis alone. Patients with septic shock can be clinically identified by a vasopressor requirement to maintain a mean arterial pressure of 65 mm Hg or greater and serum lactate level greater than 2 mmol/L (>18 mg/dL) in the absence of hypovolemia. This combination is associated with hospital mortality rates greater than 40%. In out-of-hospital, emergency department, or general hospital ward settings, adult patients with suspected infection can be rapidly identified as being more likely to have poor outcomes typical of sepsis if they have at least 2 of the following clinical criteria that together constitute a new bedside clinical score termed quickSOFA (qSOFA): respiratory rate of 22/min or greater, altered mentation, or systolic blood pressure of 100 mm Hg or less. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: These updated definitions and clinical criteria should replace previous definitions, offer greater consistency for epidemiologic studies and clinical trials, and facilitate earlier recognition and more timely management of patients with sepsis or at risk of developing sepsis.
We present an open-source update to the spherically-symmetric, general-relativistic hydrodynamics, core-collapse supernova (CCSN) code GR1D (O'Connor & Ott, 2010, CQG, 27, 114103). The source code is available at http://www.GR1Dcode.org. We extend its capabilities to include a general relativistic treatment of neutrino transport based on the moment formalisms of Shibata et al., 2011, PTP, 125, 1255 and Cardall et al., 2013, PRD, 87 103004. We pay special attention to implementing and testing numerical methods and approximations that lessen the computational demand of the transport scheme by removing the need to invert large matrices. This is especially important for the implementation and development of moment-like transport methods in two and three dimensions. A critical component of neutrino transport calculations are the neutrino-matter interaction coefficients that describe the production, absorption, scattering, and annihilation of neutrinos. In this article we also describe our open-source, neutrino interaction library NuLib (available at http://www.nulib.org). We believe that an open-source approach to describing these interactions is one of the major steps needed to pro