Machine Learning in Healthcare Informatics and Medical Biology CIBB 2019 Special session

16th International Conference on Computational Intelligence methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics
Università di Bergamo, Italy, EU
4th, 5th, 6th September 2019

Conference proceedings publication

2020-12-17 Some other articles presented at our special session has been published in the official proceedings of the conference within a Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) book.

The proceedings book is the volume 12313 of the series, and features the following articles:

• 4. Characterizing bipolar disorder-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms in a large British cohort using association rules
  by Alberto Pinheira, Rodrigo Dias, Camila Nascimento, and Inês Dutra

• 5. Evaluating deep semi-supervised learning for whole-transcriptome breast cancer subtyping
  by Silvia Cascianelli, Francisco Cristovao, Arif Canakoglu, Mark Carman, Luca Nanni, Pietro Pinoli, and Marco Masseroli

• 6. Learning weighted association rules in Human Phenotype Ontology
  by Giuseppe Agapito, Mario Cannataro, Pietro H. Guzzi, and Marianna Milano

• 7. Network modeling and analysis of normal and cancer gene expression data
  by Gaia Ceddia, Sara Pidò, and Marco Masseroli

• 8. Regularization techniques in radiomics: a case study on the prediction of pCR in breast tumours and the axilla
  by Eunice Carrasquinha, João Santinha, Alexander Mongolin, Maria Lisitskiya, Joana Ribeiro, Fátima Cardoso, Celso Matos, Leonardo Vanneschi, and Nickolas Papanikolaou

Journal supplement publication

2020-08-20 A selection of extended articles presented at the special session has been published in a supplement of the BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making journal.

The supplement is the number 5 of the 20th volume of journal, and features the following articles:

• 1. Ordinal labels in machine learning: a user-centered approach to improve data validity in medical settings
  by Andrea Seveso, Andrea Campagner, Davide Ciucci, and Federico Cabitza

• 2. Using autoencoders as a weight initialization method on deep neural networks for disease detection
  by Mafalda Falcao Ferreira, Rui Camacho, and Luis F. Teixeira

• 3. Exploiting mutual information for the imputation of static and dynamic mixed-type clinical data with an adaptive k-nearest neighbours approach
  by Erica Tavazzi, Sebastian Daberdaku, Rosario Vasta, Andrea Calvo, Adriano Chiò, and Barbara Di Camillo

Scientific programme

2020-06-01 The special session is confirmed and the scientific programme is available on the CIBB 2019 website. The registration to the CIBB 2019 conference is now open: you can register here.

Call for papers

This is the webpage for the call for papers for the special session Machine Learning in Healthcare Informatics and Medical Biology within the 16th International Conference on Computational Intelligence methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (CIBB 2019) that will be held at Università di Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy, EU.

If you are working on a project related to the topics described below, you are warmly invited to submit a short paper to our special session.

Aim and scope

Machine learning has become a pivotal tool to analyze biomedical and biological datasets, especially in the Big Data era. In fact, machine learning algorithms can identify hidden relationships and structures in health care data, and even take advantage of them to make accurate predictions about similar or future data instances. For example, machine learning software has been able to predict the diagnosis of tumor patients just by processing patients' clinical features, allowing scientists to save time and money compared to wet lab experiments. Computational researchers have also exploited machine learning to infer knowledge about patients by analyzing biological datasets, especially the ones featuring genetics and epigenomic traits. Data mining approaches applied to such datasets, in fact, can lead to relevant discoveries both to understand molecular biology and to gain new knowledge about patients’ diseases.

Our special session on "Machine Learning in Healthcare Informatics and Medical Biology" aims at boosting these scientific fields, calling for researchers able to show the potential and the advance of machine learning algorithms to make accurate computational predictions in health care datasets and in patient-oriented biological datasets.

Topics of interest include:

• Machine learning methods applied to health care and biomedical datasets
• Machine learning methods applied to genetics and epigenomics datasets, to understand the conditions of healthy and/or sick patients
• Machine learning methods applied to biological datasets to understand the underlying biomolecular scenario
• Machine learning software and tools in the health care and biological domain
• Statistical models to analyze health care, biomedical, and biological datasets
• Data mining applications in the health care and biological domain

The CIBB conference series

The International Conference on Computational Intelligence methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (CIBB) is an annual scientific conference dedicated to computational intelligence algorithms applied to bioinformatics and biostatistics problems. It started in Perugia (Italy, EU) in 2004 and CIBB 2019 will be the 16th edition. You can read more about CIBB on Wikipedia.

Special session organizers

Davide Chicco* (Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada)
Anne-Christin Hauschild (Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany)
Mickaël Mendez (University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada)
Giuseppe Jurman (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy)
João Ribeiro Pinto (Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores Tecnologia e Ciencia, Porto, Portugal)

*corresponding organizer: Davide Chicco davidechicco(AT)davidechicco.it

Special session invited speaker

Marco Masseroli, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
Talk provisional title: "Processing of big heterogeneous genomic datasets for tertiary analysis of Next Generation Sequencing data"

Reviewers

The organizers thank the paper reviewers for their extraordinary work:

• Davide Chicco (Peter Munk Cardiac Centre)
• Mickaël Mendez (University of Toronto)
• Anne-Christin Hauschild (Philipps-Universität Marburg)
• João Ribeiro Pinto (Universidade do Porto)
• Deena Gendoo (University of Birmingham)
• Arif Canakoglu (Politecnico di Milano)
• Arvind Singh Mer (Princess Margaret Cancer Centre)
• Wail Ba-Alawi (Princess Margaret Cancer Centre)
• Riccardo Rizzo (Italian National Research Council)
• Massimo La Rosa (Italian National Research Council)
• Angelo Facchiano (Italian National Research Council)
• Alex Lu (University of Toronto)

Call for papers - Short paper format

Prospective authors should submit papers prepared according to the following instructions:

• The papers must be submitted in .pdf format (this is the only accepted format)
• The papers length should be at least 4 pages and should not exceed 6 pages, on one column
• Please use the CIBB 2019 LaTeX template (.zip archive here) for your papers. In case you have issues with LaTeX, you can use other programs (such as LibreOffice or Microsoft Word) to reproduce the format and style of the sample paper available in the LaTeX style. In any case, the submitted paper must be a .pdf file.
• Papers should adhere, as much as appropriate, to the following structure and sections: 
  1. Scientific background
  2. Materials and methods
  3. Results
  4. Conclusions
  5. References

The accepted papers will be distributed at the conference as .pdf files. At least one author of an accepted paper is required to register and present their paper at the conference.

Post-conference publication

New this year: all the papers accepted to our special session will be invited to submit an extended version to a post-conference supplement on the BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making journal. We already have a preliminary agreement with the journal.

Examples of previous CIBB edition post-publications:

• Springer Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics (LNBI) book of CIBB 2017
• BMC Bioinformatics journal supplement of CIBB 2015 and CIBB 2016

        

Dates and deadlines

Extended paper submission deadline: Wednesday 15th May 2019 (FINAL STRICT DEADLINE)
Acceptance/rejection notification: Sunday 30th June 2019
Camera-ready due: Saturday 20 July 2019
Conference: Wednesday 4th, Thursday 5th, Friday 6th September 2019

The journey of the special session papers: from conference submission to journal publication

One of the goal of this special session is to drive authors to improve the quality of their papers, and make them suitable for journal publication. By taking advantage of all the steps of the submission process and of the presence at the conference, the authors can keep improving their manuscript until the final publication on the journal.
A schematic idea of the process:

• The authors submit their short paper to the special session (paper version 1.0)
• The authors address the comments of the special session peer reviewers, and submit a new version (paper version 2.0). This paper version will be informally distributed at the conference, but will not be an official publication (it will have no ISBN or DOI code).
• If the paper is accepted, the authors present it at the conference, and collect the in-person questions and comments of the audience to prepare a new version (paper version 3.0)
• If the authors are interested in publishing an extended version of their paper in the journal supplement, they extend the short paper presented at the conference, and submit it to the journal (paper version 4.0)
• The authors receive the comments of the journal editor and reviewers, addressed them, and submit a new version to the journal (paper version 5.0)
• If accepted, the paper is published in the journal supplement (paper version 6.0 -- final)

Share this call for papers

Please share this call for papers and the URL to this website:
https://davidechicco.github.io/cibb2019specialsession/

Open to new collaborators

Organizing the special session needs effort every year. Are you interested to help us with the organization of the special session? Feel free to contact us and let's discuss about it.

Previous editions

• CIBB 2018 Special Session

Contacts

For any question, please contact Davide Chicco at davidechicco(AT)davidechicco.it

Credits

This webpage is publically available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.