Topological data analysis for discovery in preclinical spinal cord injury and traumatic brain injury

TLDR

Data‑driven discovery in complex neurological disorders can extract meaningful syndromic knowledge from large, heterogeneous datasets to enhance precision medicine. The study applies topological data analysis to preclinical traumatic brain injury and spinal cord injury datasets to discover novel syndromic patterns. The authors mined the VISION‑SCI repository and used TDA to visualize interrelated histopathological, functional, and health outcomes. TDA uncovered novel interactions between SCI and co‑occurring TBI, identified detrimental drug effects in unpublished multicentre preclinical trials, showed perioperative hypertension predicts long‑term recovery better than any tested drug after thoracic SCI in rats, and highlighted its potential for decision‑support in basic research and clinical practice.

Abstract

Abstract Data-driven discovery in complex neurological disorders has potential to extract meaningful syndromic knowledge from large, heterogeneous data sets to enhance potential for precision medicine. Here we describe the application of topological data analysis (TDA) for data-driven discovery in preclinical traumatic brain injury (TBI) and spinal cord injury (SCI) data sets mined from the Visualized Syndromic Information and Outcomes for Neurotrauma-SCI (VISION-SCI) repository. Through direct visualization of inter-related histopathological, functional and health outcomes, TDA detected novel patterns across the syndromic network, uncovering interactions between SCI and co-occurring TBI, as well as detrimental drug effects in unpublished multicentre preclinical drug trial data in SCI. TDA also revealed that perioperative hypertension predicted long-term recovery better than any tested drug after thoracic SCI in rats. TDA-based data-driven discovery has great potential application for decision-support for basic research and clinical problems such as outcome assessment, neurocritical care, treatment planning and rapid, precision-diagnosis.