CytoCom: a Cytoscape app to visualize, query and analyse disease comorbidity networks.

Abstract

CytoCom is an interactive plugin for Cytoscape that can be used to search, explore, analyse and visualize human disease comorbidity network. It represents disease-disease associations in terms of bipartite graphs and provides International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD9)-centric and disease name centric views of disease information. It allows users to find associations between diseases based on the two measures: Relative Risk (RR) and [Formula: see text]-correlation values. In the disease network, the size of each node is based on the prevalence of that disease. CytoCom is capable of clustering disease network based on the ICD9 disease category. It provides user-friendly access that facilitates exploration of human diseases, and finds additional associated diseases by double-clicking a node in the existing network. Additional comorbid diseases are then connected to the existing network. It is able to assist users for interpretation and exploration of the human diseases by a variety of built-in functions. Moreover, CytoCom permits multi-colouring of disease nodes according to standard disease classification for expedient visualization.