GraphChrom: A Novel Graph-Based Framework for Cancer Classification Using Chromosomal Rearrangement Endpoints

Simple Summary Cancer is among the leading causes of death in the United States and worldwide. Early prediction of cancers is important for the improvement of treatment outcomes and survival rates, thus resulting in significant social and economic impacts. Recent developments have focused primarily on using gene expression and mutation data to predict or classify cancer types. Here, we show that chromosomal rearrangement endpoints alone can predict cancer types with more reliability and specificity. Chromosomal rearrangements are generally a consequence of improperly repaired double-strand breaks in DNA. These genomic aberrations can be a driver of cancers. Here, we investigated the use of chromosomal rearrangements for classification of cancer tumors and the effect of inter- and intrachromosomal rearrangements in cancer classification. We used data from the Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer (COSMIC) for breast, pancreatic, and prostate cancers, for which the COSMIC dataset reports the highest number of chromosomal aberrations. We developed a framework known as GraphChrom for cancer classification. GraphChrom was developed using a graph neural network which models the complex structure of chromosomal aberrations (CA) and provides local connectivity between the aberrations. The proposed framework illustrates three important contributions to the field of cancers. Firstly, it successfully classifies cancer types and subtypes. Secondly, it evolved into a novel data extraction technique which can be used to extract more informative graphs (informative aberrations associated with a sample); and thirdly, it predicts that interCAs (rearrangements between two or more chromosomes) are more effective in cancer prediction than intraCAs (rearrangements within the same chromosome), although intraCAs are three times more likely to occur than intraCAs.

Automated summary

This study explores the use of chromosomal rearrangements for cancer classification and highlights the significance of interchromosomal rearrangements in cancer prediction. The findings suggest that interchromosomal rearrangements are more effective than intrachromosomal rearrangements for cancer prediction.