White Paper – NGP Validation (June 2019)
Validation Study of the Integration of Next-Generation Phenotyping in Exome Analysis
A collaboration between Greenwood Genetic Center (SC, USA) and FDNA (MA, USA)
Summary
Next-generation phenotyping (NGP) technologies capture, structure, and analyze complex phenotypic
information to produce actionable genomic insights. DeepGestalt is an NGP technology that currently
supports more than 300 specific genetic syndromes and syndrome groups, representing 45% of cases
solved by WES. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) augmented by NGP results in more efficient and
accurate diagnoses.
In this study, we show that:
• Integration of NGP in the variant analysis workflow dramatically increases diagnostic yield and
efficiency as compared to traditional methods of variant prioritization, placing causative genes in ≤
5th rank in 50% of cases;
• NGP increases the number of top-ranked causative genes in both “easily solved” and “challenging”
cases, with an overall improvement in ranking across all cases;
• NGP ranking among cases supported by DeepGestalt is even more impressive, showing 67%
ranked in the top 5, compared to 11% based on GGC and CADD ranks;
• NGP may enable prioritization of causative variants independent of parental data, decreasing costs
by reducing the need to complete parental WES and increasing diagnostic yield by enabling
diagnosis of cases where parental samples are unavailable;
• Expanding NGP analysis beyond the face (brain MRIs, skeletal radiographs, fundoscopy) will
increase the amount of syndromes supported.