Global Approaches to Complex Diseases and Syndromes: Pediatric ALIARDS

The practice of medicine is quickly evolving with ongoing development and access to technology that drives interest and implementation of Personalized (or Precision) Medicine. Most diseases are really complex diseases, e.g. cancer, diabetes and heart disease, and this includes conditions that are referred to as syndromes. These continue to be major diagnostic challenges for physicians. In this report we describe an innovative approach to examining the complexity of all available data, using social network analysis in pediatric Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome where disease and patient stratification can contribute greatly to improve patient outcome. We believe that the network-based approach presented impacts the "discovery" aspect of hypothesis generation and enhances the ability to identify complex relationships critical to improving clinical care, exposing them for appropriate statistical validation.