Predicting Outcomes of Hormone and Chemotherapy in the Molecular Taxonomy of Breast Cancer International Consortium (METABRIC) Study by Biochemically-inspired Machine Learning.

Journal: F1000Research
Published Date:

Abstract

Genomic aberrations and gene expression-defined subtypes in the large METABRIC patient cohort have been used to stratify and predict survival. The present study used normalized gene expression signatures of paclitaxel drug response to predict outcome for different survival times in METABRIC patients receiving hormone (HT) and, in some cases, chemotherapy (CT) agents. This machine learning method, which distinguishes sensitivity vs. resistance in breast cancer cell lines and validates predictions in patients; was also used to derive gene signatures of other HT  (tamoxifen) and CT agents (methotrexate, epirubicin, doxorubicin, and 5-fluorouracil) used in METABRIC. Paclitaxel gene signatures exhibited the best performance, however the other agents also predicted survival with acceptable accuracies. A support vector machine (SVM) model of paclitaxel response containing genes  and  was 78.6% accurate in predicting survival of 84 patients treated with both HT and CT (median survival ≥ 4.4 yr). Accuracy was lower (73.4%) in 304 untreated patients. The performance of other machine learning approaches was also evaluated at different survival thresholds. Minimum redundancy maximum relevance feature selection of a paclitaxel-based SVM classifier based on expression of genes  and  was 81.1% accurate in 53 CT patients. In addition, a random forest (RF) classifier using a gene signature ( and ) predicted >3-year survival with 85.5% accuracy in 420 HT patients. A similar RF gene signature showed 82.7% accuracy in 504 patients treated with CT and/or HT. These results suggest that tumor gene expression signatures refined by machine learning techniques can be useful for predicting survival after drug therapies.

Authors

  • Eliseos J Mucaki
    Department of Biochemistry, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry University of Western Ontario, London, Canada N6A 2C8 Canada.
  • Katherina Baranova
    Deparment of Biochemistry , University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.
  • Huy Q Pham
    School of Computer Science, University of Windsor, Windsor, Canada.
  • Iman Rezaeian
    School of Computer Science, University of Windsor, Windsor, Canada.
  • Dimo Angelov
    Department of Computer Science, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.
  • Alioune Ngom
    School of Computer Science, University of Windsor, Windsor, Canada.
  • Luis Rueda
    School of Computer Science, University of Windsor, Windsor, Canada.
  • Peter K Rogan
    Department of Biochemistry, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry University of Western Ontario, London, Canada N6A 2C8 Canada.

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