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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Genet.
Sec. Computational Genomics
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fgene.2024.1437174

Transparent Sparse Graph Pathway Network for Analyzing the Internal Relationship of Lung Cancer

Provisionally accepted
Zhibin Jin Zhibin Jin 1Yuhu Shi Yuhu Shi 1*Lili Zhou Lili Zhou 2
  • 1 Shanghai Maritime University, pudong, China
  • 2 Yangpu District Central Hospital, Shanghai, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    While finding the key biomarkers and improving the accuracy of the model, it is equally important to understand the interaction relationship in diseases. In this study, a transparent sparse graph pathway network (TSGPN) is proposed based on the structure of graph neural networks. This network simulates the action of genes in vivo, adds prior knowledge, and improves the accuracy of the model. Firstly, the graph connection is constructed according to protein-protein interaction networks and competing endogenous RNAs (ceRNA) network, and then some noises or unimportant connections are removed spontaneously based on graph attention mechanism and hard concrete estimation, so as to realize the reconstruction of ceRNA network which represents the influence of other genes in the disease on mRNA. Next, the gene-based interpretation is transformed into the pathway-based interpretation based on the pathway database, and the hidden layer is added to realize the high-dimensional analysis of the pathway. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed TSGPN method is superior to other comparison methods in F1 score and AUC, and more importantly, it can well display the role of genes. Through the data analysis applied to lung cancer prognosis, 10 pathways related to LUSC prognosis were found, as well as the key biomarkers closely related to these pathways, such as HOXA10, hsa-mir-182 and LINC02544. The relationship between them has also been reconstructed to better explain the internal mechanism of disease.

    Keywords: Graph neural networks, biological pathway, Edge prediction, ceRNA, LUSC

    Received: 27 May 2024; Accepted: 09 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Jin, Shi and Zhou. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Yuhu Shi, Shanghai Maritime University, pudong, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.