IMA: Identifying disease-related genes using MeSH terms and association rules

Genes play an important role in several diseases. Hence, in biology, identifying relationships between diseases and genes is important for the analysis of diseases, because mutated or dysregulated genes play an important role in pathogenesis. Here, we propose a method to identify disease-related genes using MeSH terms and association rules. We identified genes by analyzing the MeSH terms and extracted information on gene-gene interactions based on association rules. By integrating the extracted interactions, we constructed gene-gene networks and identified disease-related genes. We applied the proposed method to study five cancers, including prostate, lung, breast, stomach, and colorectal cancer, and demonstrated that the proposed method is more useful for identifying disease-related and candidate disease-related genes than previously published methods. In this study, we identified 20 genes for each disease. Among them, we presented 34 important candidate genes with evidence that supports the relationship of the candidate genes with diseases.