Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) constitutes a spectrum of chronic inflammatory disorders which recurrently affects the gastro-intestinal tract of millions of patients worldwide. Ulcerative colitis (UC) andCrohn’s disease (CD) are the two main clinically defined manifestations of IBD, each with distinctive clinical and pathological features. Endoscopy constitutes the gold standard for the diagnosis and monitoring of IBD. The diagnosis is usually confirmed by colon biopsy and complemented with the measurement of clinical molecular biomarkers. Their low sensitivity and high variability limit clinical efficacy. Thus, there is a need to identify novel biomarkers that could be assessed with less invasive methods.

Objective

This challenge is directed towards finding the best classification algorithm that can be used in diagnosing Inflammatory Bowel Disease with data obtained from non-invasive clinical samples, and it comes with a prize-pool of $12,000.

The Metagenomics Diagnosis for Inflammatory Bowel Disease Challenge aims to investigate the diagnostic potential of metagenomics data to discriminate patients with IBD including UC and CD from non-IBD subjects, or within IBD subjects, separating UC and CD subjects.