Attila Kertesz-Farkas successfully defended Doctoral Thesis
On May 19th, 2022, Attila Kertesz-Farkas defended the doctoral thesis.
On May 19, 2022, Attila Kertesz-Farkas, associate professor of the School of Data Analysis and Artificial Intelligence, Head of AIC LAB, defended his doctoral thesis.
The thesis was defended on the topic "Computational methods for tandem mass spectrometry data annotation", 05.13.17 "Theoretical foundations of Computer Science".
Tandem mass spectrometry has become the standard method to identify molecules and proteins in complex biological mixtures (e.g. blood drops), and the data obtained is routinely analyzed with computer programs. Roughly, 50-80% of the data cannot be annotated with high confidence due the following issues: (1) low discriminative power of the score functions, i.e. the ability to discriminate between correct and incorrect annotations, (2) raw scores are not calibrated properly and lack universal semantics, (3) incomplete candidate peptide sets, i.e. the correct peptide is not included to the reference set possibly due to a post-translational modification (PTMs), (4) noise, i.e. the mass spectrometer produces considerably amount of noise in the spectra, and (5) detector/Instrument accuracy. The dissertation presents novel computational methods to tackle down the issues 1-4 and they achieved state-of-the-art performance in data annotation at the time of their publication. Therefore, more accurate data identification and spectrum annotation can be obtained which and experimenters and practitioners can conclude correct conclusions about their experiments and to make proper decisions for future experiments or clinical therapies, for instance, in selecting the right drug therapy.
Congratulations and wish you further success!