Fig 5. Complementary approaches to discovering comparable diseases.

Bipolar disorder is used as a test case to find comparable diseases (DiseaseComps) via two methods. (A) One of CTD’s current methods uses shared genes to compute a statistical similarity index that ranks comparable diseases, and includes psychotic disorders as the top hit for bipolar disorder (green box). (B) An alternative, complementary approach is to use only shared inferred GO-BP terms to find similar diseases that share biological processes (without sharing genes). Here, substance-induced psychoses (green box) is highly scored and redolent of psychotic disorders found using genes (connecting green arrow). Interestingly, other heterogeneous pathologies (red boxes) predicted to be comparable to bipolar disorder have been verified in the recent literature (see text).