Distinguishing Rectal Cancer from Colon Cancer Based on the Support Vector Machine Method and RNA-sequencing Data

摘要

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer worldwide.Several studies have indicated that rectal cancer is significantly different from colon cancer interms of treatment, prognosis, and metastasis. Recently, the differential mRNA expression of coloncancer and rectal cancer has received a great deal of attention. The current study aimed to identifysignificant differences between colon cancer and rectal cancer based on RNA sequencing (RNA-seq)data via support vector machines (SVM). Here, 393 CRC samples from the The Cancer GenomeAtlas (TCGA) database were investigated, including 298 patients with colon cancer and 95 withrectal cancer. Following the random forest (RF) analysis of the mRNA expression data, 96 genessuch as HOXB13, PR4C, and BCLAFI were identified and utilized to build the SVM classificationmodel with the Leave-One-Out Cross-validation (LOOCV) algorithm. In the training (n= 196)and the validation cohorts (n=197), the accuracy (82. 1 % and 82.2 %, respectively) and the AUC(0.87 and 0.91, respectively) indicated that the established optimal SVM classification modeldistinguished colon cancer from rectal cancer reasonably. However, additional experiments arerequired to validate the predicted gene expression levels and functions.