Identification of most influential co-occurring gene suites for gastrointestinal cancer using biomedical literature mining and graph-based influence maximization

Background Gastrointestinal (GI) cancer including colorectal cancer, gastric cancer, pancreatic cancer, etc., are among the most frequent malignancies diagnosed annually and represent a major public health problem worldwide. Methods This paper reports an aided curation pipeline to identify potential influential genes for gastrointestinal cancer. The curation pipeline integrates biomedical literature to identify named entities by Bi-LSTM-CNN-CRF methods. The entities and their associations can be used to construct a graph, and from which we can compute the sets of co-occurring genes that are the most influential based on an influence maximization algorithm. Results The sets of co-occurring genes that are the most influential that we discover include RARA - CRBP1, CASP3 - BCL2, BCL2 - CASP3 - CRBP1, RARA - CASP3 - CRBP1, FOXJ1 - RASSF3 - ESR1, FOXJ1 - RASSF1A - ESR1, FOXJ1 - RASSF1A - TNFAIP8 - ESR1. With TCGA and functional and pathway enrichment analysis, we prove the proposed approach works well in the context of gastrointestinal cancer. Conclusions Our pipeline that uses text mining to identify objects and relationships to construct a graph and uses graph-based influence maximization to discover the most influential co-occurring genes presents a viable direction to assist knowledge discovery for clinical applications.