Download PDFOpen PDF in browserMeasurement of similarity in C. elegans healthspan using dynamic time warping on movement features9 pages•Published: March 11, 2020AbstractC. elegans is an ideal organism for modeling aging research due to their simple neural connectome and relatively short life. Current issues faced within aging research includes the decoupling of lifespan and healthspan. We propose a method to efficiently measure the healthspan of a nematode by considering healthspan as a comparable characteristic of the lifespan of a worm, where the lifespan is represented as a temporal sequence. We apply Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) so that the healthspan of any set of worms can be compared based on locomotion feature values’ similarity over time. This technique allows us to compare the effects of various gene knockouts on the healthspan of the worm, such as daf2, in comparison to its wildtype N2. Results show that daf2 worm increases the lifespan of the worm, and using DTW to compare each feature as it changes over time, we can see that the proportion of its life that it stays in a healthy state also increases compared to N2 worms. To validate the results, we measure the time period a worm is healthy and the time period it is frail using a method called frailty threshold analysis. This allows us to determine the day a worm converts from being healthy to frail. We then compare the longevity of healthy state and frail state between worm types based on the duration of healthy state and frail state to see that daf2 in fact extends its healthy state since the proportion it stays in healthy state is greater than that of N2.Keyphrases: age related research, aging, bioinformatics, c. elegans, computational biology, dynamic time warping, healthspan, lifespan, medical informatics, nematode In: Qin Ding, Oliver Eulenstein and Hisham Al-Mubaid (editors). Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, vol 70, pages 208-216.
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