Unsupervised and supervised learning with neural network for human transcriptome analysis and cancer diagnosis.

Journal: Scientific reports
Published Date:

Abstract

Deep learning analysis of images and text unfolds new horizons in medicine. However, analysis of transcriptomic data, the cause of biological and pathological changes, is hampered by structural complexity distinctive from images and text. Here we conduct unsupervised training on more than 20,000 human normal and tumor transcriptomic data and show that the resulting Deep-Autoencoder, DeepT2Vec, has successfully extracted informative features and embedded transcriptomes into 30-dimensional Transcriptomic Feature Vectors (TFVs). We demonstrate that the TFVs could recapitulate expression patterns and be used to track tissue origins. Trained on these extracted features only, a supervised classifier, DeepC, can effectively distinguish tumors from normal samples with an accuracy of 90% for Pan-Cancer and reach an average 94% for specific cancers. Training on a connected network, the accuracy is further increased to 96% for Pan-Cancer. Together, our study shows that deep learning with autoencoder is suitable for transcriptomic analysis, and DeepT2Vec could be successfully applied to distinguish cancers, normal tissues, and other potential traits with limited samples.

Authors

  • Bo Yuan
    New Use Agriculture and Natural Plant Products Program, Department of Plant Biology and Center for Agricultural Food Ecosystems, Institute of Food, Nutrition & Health, Rutgers University, 59 Dudley Road, New Brunswick, NJ, 08901, USA.
  • Dong Yang
    College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Shaanxi University of Science and Technology Xi'an 710021 China yangdong@sust.edu.cn.
  • Bonnie E G Rothberg
    Medical Oncology, Department of Internal Medicine, Yale Cancer Center, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, USA.
  • Hao Chang
    Department of Genetics, Yale Cancer Center, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Yale University School of Medicine, 295 Congress Avenue, New Haven, CT, 06510, USA.
  • Tian Xu
    School of Civil and Architecture Engineering, Xi'an Technological University, Xi'an 710032, China.