This paper describes the development of a questionnaire for evaluating usability during EHR system procurement (DPUQ). Established usability questionnaires can be used to gather user feedback after using the systems. However, during procurement, experimenting with real system use is practical only with a limited number of system candidates. There is a need for less resource-demanding usability ...

Genetic analysis of complex diseases demands novel analytical methods to interpret data collected on thousands of variables by genome-wide association studies. The complexity of such analysis is multiplied when one has to consider interaction effects, be they among the genetic variations (G x G) or with environment risk factors (G x E). Several statistical learning methods seem quite promising ...

BACKGROUND Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a very heterogeneous disease that affects approximately 1% of the general population. Recently, the genetic complexity thought to underlie this condition was further supported by three independent studies that identified an increased number of damaging de novo mutations DNM in different SCZ probands. While these three reports support the implication of DNM in t...

OBJECTIVE Predictive tests that capitalize on emerging genetic findings hold great promise for enhanced personalized healthcare. With the emergence of a large amount of data from genome-wide association studies (GWAS), interest has shifted towards high-dimensional risk prediction. METHODS To form predictive genetic tests on high-dimensional data, we propose a non-parametric method, called the...

Evolutionary change is a product of selection. Selection operates on the phenotype, and its consequences are manifest in representation of the genotype in successive generations. Of particular interest to both evolutionary and behavioral biologists is the newly emerging field of epigenetics and behavior. Two broad categories of epigenetic modifications must be distinguished. Context-dependent e...

In recent years pleiotropy, the phenomenon of one genetic locus influencing several traits, has become a widely researched field in human genetics. With the increasing availability of genome-wide association study summary statistics, as well as the establishment of deeply phenotyped sample collections, it is now possible to systematically assess the genetic overlap between multiple traits and d...

Asthma Genetic Association studies have been plagued by methodologic problems that are common in all studies of complex traits: small sample size, lack of replication, and lack of control of population stratification. Despite this, the field has identified 43 replicated genes from association studies. The most frequently replicated are: TNF alpha, IL4, FCERB, Adam 33, and GSTP1. Several genes h...

Genetic variants that predispose adults and the elderly to high blood pressure are largely unknown. We used a bivariate linear mixed model approach to jointly test the associations of common single-nucleotide polymorphisms with systolic and diastolic blood pressure using data from a genome-wide association study consisting of genetic variants from chromosomes 3 and 9 and longitudinal measured p...

Environmentally induced phenotypic plasticity may be a critical component of response to changing environments. We examined local differentiation and adaptive phenotypic plasticity in response to elevated temperature in half-sib lines collected across an elevation gradient for the alpine herb, Wahlenbergia ceracea. Using Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (AFLP), we found low but significan...

Variation in personality traits is 30-60% attributed to genetic influences. Attempts to unravel these genetic influences at the molecular level have, so far, been inconclusive. We performed the first genome-wide association study of Cloninger's temperament scales in a sample of 5117 individuals, in order to identify common genetic variants underlying variation in personality. Participants' scor...