Individualized Knowledge Graph: A Viable Informatics Path to Precision Medicine

We present here a vision of individualized Knowledge Graphs (iKGs) in cardiovascular medicine: a modern informatics platform of exchange and inquiry that comprehensively integrates biological knowledge with medical histories and health outcomes of individual patients. We envision that this could transform how clinicians and scientists together discover, communicate, and apply new knowledge . What if physicians had their own personal artificial intelligence assistant—similar to Tony Stark’s J.A.R.V.I.S.—to help prescribe individualized strategies for patient care? In our era of digital biomedicine, this symbiotic human–machine interaction has for the first time become a feasible reality. We have at our fingertips the depth, dimension, and scale of information to piece together a holistic picture of disease and the human condition; however, the human capacity to analyze and extract knowledge is limited, and collaborations with computers could drastically enhance the power and speed at which an integrated view of disease is synthesized.1 Beginning in 2017, 1 million Americans will participate in the Precision Medicine Initiative All of Us Research Program. Moreover, the National Institutes of Health Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program2–4 calls for a knowledge network that uses biomedical informatics to bridge basic biological knowledge on molecular disease drivers with higher-level phenotypic abstractions representing a patient’s clinical manifestation. This network could link evidence across methods used to characterize a disease process, hone disease classification, sharpen treatment regimens, and tailor preventative strategies for specific individuals. Both current and emerging informatics developments have shaped everyday clinical practice, including but not limited to echocardiographic pattern recognition,5 Framingham Risk Score,6 and random survival forests for predicting survival in systolic heart failure.7 In our view, these studies have begun to explore the promise of modern biomedical informatics. In the last decade, integrated omics science has provided unmatched power for unbiased characterization of …