Hall 123

Computational Mathematics in Biomedical Sciences

Aarti Jajoo

Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, USA

We discuss applications of mathematics in Contemporary Biomedical Research that involves image processing, shape analysis and epigenomics. We start with Computational Anatomy and Morphometrics, concerning quantitative and qualitative analysis of shapes pertaining to biological and anatomical objects that are extracted from modern imaging modalities. These disciplines rely on mathematical modeling involving for instance control theory, differential geometry, etc. We explore its utilization in analyzing functional impact of cardiovascular surgeries and in planning maxillofacial surgeries.

Further, we study yet another mathematical application in the context of epigenomics. DNA Methylation sites in close proximity of each other are known to have sustainable correlation structures (CSs). But their consistency across individuals and tissues, genomic context, and relevance to disease have remained unexplored. To identify and explore CSs, we assess patterns of correlated CpG loci on the commonly used Illumina 450KBeadArray for 28 experimentally-derived and publicly-available datasets, spanning 27 tissues and 11,000 individuals. We identify significant differences in CSs between diseased and non-disease states, including cancer, with disease-specific patterns of disruption.