The continuous accumulation of biomedical data has made imperative the need to combine the available data, a process which is traditionally called meta-analysis. Meta-analysis is a statistical method, in which a set of original studies is synthesized and the potential diversity across them is explored. Meta-analysis was first applied in the field of psychology. In medical research it was initially applied to randomized clinical trials, but nowadays, it is considered a valuable tool for the combination of observational studies, diagnostic studies, pharmacogenomics, as well as for gene-disease association studies. Moreover, meta-analysis has also been proven useful in summarizing the results of high-throughput experiments such as genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and gene expression studies using microarrays.

Workshops

• Τhe Workshops I and II will take place in June 25, 2015, in Computer Laboratory I at the Department of Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics, University of Thessaly, Lamia, Greece.
• Due to the limited number of people who can participate (25 people), please visit the respective Doodle Poll and declare your attention to participate in the Workshops, by sending a short CV to Katerina Pantavou by June 15. The participants will be notified by June 18.
  
• If the number of participants exceeds the limit of 25 people, there will be a selection based on participants' CVs.
• All participants should be registered on the day of Workshops and before the Workshops begin (Thursday 25 June 2015, registration time 13:00 - 14:00).
• People who have not declare their attention to participate in Doodle Poll, can also be registered in Workshops before they begin (Thursday 25 June 2015, registration time 13:00 - 14:00), only if the maximum number of participants has not been reached.
• Certificates of participation will be available to those who will complete the workshops.
• There is no participation fee for the workshops.
  

Workshop I: Introduction to Meta-analysis

Starting time 14:00
Instructors: Panagiota Kontou, Niki Dimou
Workshop I is intended for senior undergraduate, graduate and master students, PhD candidates as well as for researchers in biomedical fields, no necessarily having a background in statistics. It is an interactive workshop that introduces participants to the concepts and principles of meta-analysis, providing them the opportunity to acquire skills for using basic methods of meta-analysis.

Workshop Ι will cover the following topics:

• Description of systematic review and meta-analysis
• Role of meta-analysis in research
• Retrieval of published studies
• Collection and recording of data
• Bias due to selective reporting of the results and multiple comparisons
• Measures for relative risk in discrete and continuous data
  
• Choice of the statistical model (fixed-effects and random-effects)
• Homogeneity tests
• Publication bias
• Tests for time trend of the results
• Meta-regression
• Presenting results of published meta-analyses

The above mentioned methods will be applied using the statistical package Stata 10 (Stata Corporation, College Station, Texas, USA).

Please visit the Doodle Poll to declare your intention to participate in the Workshop I

Workshop II: Advanced Meta-analysis

Starting time 18:00
Instructors: Niki Dimou, Panagiota Kontou
Workshop II is intended for senior undergraduate, graduate and master students, PhD candidates as well as for researchers in biomedical sciences and statistics, familiar with the basic methods of meta-analysis. It is an interactive workshop that focuses on multivariate methods of meta-analysis providing students an integrated perspective of the methods used to combine data from relevant but independent studies.

Workshop ΙΙ will cover the following topics:

• Multivariate methods for meta-analysis
• Calculation of the within-studies covariances
• A multivariate method for meta-analysis in dose-response models
• A multivariate method for meta-analysis in genetic association studies
• A multivariate method for meta-analysis in observational studies that share the same group of controls or in clinical trials with multiple treatments that share a common placebo group
• Combining population-based and family-based genetic association studies under a multivariate framework for meta-analysis
• A multivariate method for meta-analysis of studies investigating gene-environment interactions
• A multivariate method for meta-analysis and comparison of diagnostic studies
• Presenting results of published meta-analyses

The above mentioned methods will be applied using the statistical package Stata 10 (Stata Corporation, College Station, Texas, USA).

Please visit the Doodle Poll to declare your intention to participate in the Workshop II

Workshop III:“Bioinformatics with Perl”

• Workshops III will take place in October 29, 2015, in Computer Laboratory I at the Department of Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics, University of Thessaly, Lamia, Greece.
• Due to the limited number of people who can participate (25 people), please visit the respective Doodle Poll and declare your attention to participate in the Workshops, by sending a short CV to Katerina Pantavou by October 25. The participants will be notified promptly.
  
• If the number of participants exceeds the limit of 25 people, there will be a selection based on participants' CVs.
• All participants should be registered on the day of Workshop and before the Workshop begin.
• People who have not declare their attention to participate in Doodle Poll, can also be registered in Workshops before they begin, only if the maximum number of participants has not been reached.
• Certificates of participation will be available to those who will complete the workshops.
• There is no participation fee for the workshops.
  

Starting time 15:00
Instructors: Pantelis Bagos, Panagiota Kontou
Workshop III is intended for senior undergraduate, graduate and master students, PhD candidates as well as for researchers in biomedical sciences and statistics.Perl is one of the most popular scripting languages for biological data analysis. The objective of the workshop is to introduce the basic features of the Perl language and at the same time to demonstrate its abilities in Bioinformatics applications. At the end of the course, participants will have a good working knowledge of the Perl programming language and ability to develop Perl Scripts which will help them to handle biological sequence data.

What you will learn?

• The basics of programming in Perl:

• How to use variables and operators in Perl
• Arrays, hashes, conditions, loops
• How to read and write files using Perl

• Applications in Bioinformatics:

• How to build regular expressions and find patterns and motifs in biological sequences
• How to read and convert biological sequences from various formats
• How to simulate random protein sequences
• How to find Open Reading Frames (ORFs) in DNA sequences

Please visit the Doodle Poll to declare your intention to participate in the Workshop III

Scientific coordinator: Pantelis Bagos, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics, University of Thessaly.
For any information please contact: Katerina Pantavou