DiseaseNet: a transfer learning approach to noncommunicable disease classification.

BMC Bioinformatics

Department of Biological Sciences and BioDiscovery Institute, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA.

Published: March 2024

As noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) pose a significant global health burden, identifying effective diagnostic and predictive markers for these diseases is of paramount importance. Epigenetic modifications, such as DNA methylation, have emerged as potential indicators for NCDs. These have previously been exploited in other contexts within the framework of neural network models that capture complex relationships within the data. Applications of neural networks have led to significant breakthroughs in various biological or biomedical fields but these have not yet been effectively applied to NCD modeling. This is, in part, due to limited datasets that are not amenable to building of robust neural network models. In this work, we leveraged a neural network trained on one class of NCDs, cancer, as the basis for a transfer learning approach to non-cancer NCD modeling. Our results demonstrate promising performance of the model in predicting three NCDs, namely, arthritis, asthma, and schizophrenia, for the respective blood samples, with an overall accuracy (f-measure) of 94.5%. Furthermore, a concept based explanation method called Testing with Concept Activation Vectors (TCAV) was used to investigate the importance of the sample sources and understand how future training datasets for multiple NCD models may be improved. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of transfer learning in developing accurate diagnostic and predictive models for NCDs.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10926612PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12859-024-05734-5DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

transfer learning
12
neural network
12
learning approach
8
diagnostic predictive
8
network models
8
ncd modeling
8
ncds
5
diseasenet transfer
4
approach noncommunicable
4
noncommunicable disease
4

Similar Publications

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!