DrOGA: An Artificial Intelligence Solution for Driver-Status Prediction of Genomics Mutations in Precision Cancer Medicine

Abstract

Precision cancer medicine suggests that better cancer treatments would be possible guiding therapies by tumor's genomics alterations. This hypothesis boosted exome sequencing studies, collection of cancer variants databases and developing of statistical and Machine Learning-driven methods for alterations' analysis. In order to extract relevant information from huge exome sequencing data, accurate methods to distinguish driver and neutral or passengers mutations are vital. Nevertheless, traditional variant classification methods have often low precision in favour of higher recall. Here, we propose several traditional Machine Learning and new Deep Learning techniques to finely classify driver somatic non-synonymous mutations based on a 70-features annotation, derived from medical and statistical tools. We collected and annotated a complete database containing driver and neutral alterations from various public data sources. Our framework, called Driver-Oriented Genomics Analysis (DrOGA), presents the best performances compared to individual and other ensemble methods on our data. Explainable Artificial Intelligence is used to provide visual and clinical explanation of the results, with a particular focus on the most relevant annotations. This analysis and the proposed tool, along with the collected database and the feature engineering pipeline suggested, can help the study of genomics alterations in human cancers allowing precision oncology targeted therapies based on personal data from next-generation sequencing.