Abstract:
Understanding disease relationships is important to enhance knowledge in systems biology as well as
disease diagnosis and treatment. Several studies attempt to find genes essential for diseases. However, knowledge
of essential genes alone is not enough to complete understanding of disease mechanisms. Several computational
methods have been developed to find relationships between diseases. These methods are widely used to support
studying in systems biology. This paper reviews disease relationship metrics, named disease association indices,
for identifying relationships between diseases in human. In particular, the measurements are based on networkbased
approaches.