Prediction of liver cancer prognosis based on immune cell marker genes

Abstract

Introduction: Monitoring the response after treatment of liver cancer and timely adjusting the treatment strategy are crucial to improve the survival rate of liver cancer. At present, the clinical monitoring of liver cancer after treatment is mainly based on serum markers and imaging. Morphological evaluation has limitations, such as the inability to measure small tumors and the poor repeatability of measurement, which is not applicable to cancer evaluation after immunotherapy or targeted treatment. The determination of serum markers is greatly affected by the environment and cannot accurately evaluate the prognosis. With the development of single cell sequencing technology, a large number of immune cell-specific genes have been identified. Immune cells and microenvironment play an important role in the process of prognosis. We speculate that the expression changes of immune cell-specific genes can indicate the process of prognosis.

Method: Therefore, this paper first screened out the immune cell-specific genes related to liver cancer, and then built a deep learning model based on the expression of these genes to predict metastasis and the survival time of liver cancer patients. We verified and compared the model on the data set of 372 patients with liver cancer.

Result: The experiments found that our model is significantly superior to other methods, and can accurately identify whether liver cancer patients have metastasis and predict the survival time of liver cancer patients according to the expression of immune cell-specific genes.

Discussion: We found these immune cell-specific genes participant multiple cancer-related pathways. We fully explored the function of these genes, which would support the development of immunotherapy for liver cancer.

Keywords: cell marker; deep learning; immune cell; liver cancer; prognosis.