System for genome analysis and genetic disease diagnosis

Abstract

The method for genome analysis translates the clinical findings in the patient into a comprehensive test order for genes that can be causative of the patient's illness, delimits analysis of variants identified in the patient's genome to those that are 'on target' for the patient's illness, and provides clinical annotation of the likely causative variants for inclusion in a variant warehouse that is updated as a result of each sample that is analyzed and that, in turn, provides a source of additional annotation for variants. The method uses a genome sequence having the steps of entering at least one clinical feature of a patient by an end-user, assigning a weighted value to the term based on the probability of the presence of the term, mapping the term to at least one disease by accessing a knowledge base containing a plurality of data sets, wherein the data sets are made up of associations between (i) clinical features and diseases, (ii) diseases and genes, (iii) genes and genetic variants, and (iv) diseases and gene variants, assigning a truth value to each of the mapped terms based on the associated data sets and the weighted value, to provide a list of results of possible diagnoses prioritized based on the truth values, with continuous adjustment of the weightings of associations in the knowledge base based on updating of each discovered diagnosis and attendant clinical features, genes and gene variants. This method can be performed in fifty hours or twenty-four hours or less.