PHESANT: a tool for performing automated phenome scans in UK Biobank

Abstract

ABSTRACTMotivationEpidemiological cohorts typically contain a diverse set of phenotypes such that automation of phenome scans is non-trivial, because they require highly heterogeneous models. For this reason, phenome scans have to date tended to use a smaller homogeneous set of phenotypes that can be analysed in a consistent fashion. We present PHESANT (PHEnome Scan ANalysis Tool), a software package for performing comprehensive phenome scans in UK Biobank.General featuresPHESANT tests the association of a specified trait with all continuous, integer and categorical variables in UK Biobank, or a specified subset. PHESANT uses a novel rule-based algorithm to determine how to appropriately test each trait, then performs the analyses and produces plots and summary tables.ImplementationThe PHESANT phenome scan is implemented in R. PHESANT includes a novel Javascript D3.js visualization, and accompanying Java code that converts the phenome scan results to the required JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format.AVAILABILITYPHESANT is available on GitHub at [https://github.com/MRCIEU/PHESANT]. Git tag v0.2 corresponds to the version presented here.