■复杂疾病的进展有时会经历剧烈的关键转变,生物系统突然从相对健康的状态(过渡前阶段)转变为疾病状态(过渡后阶段)。寻找这种关键过渡或临界状态对于为患者提供及时有效的科学治疗至关重要。然而,在大多数情况下,只有少量的临床数据可用,导致在检测复杂疾病的临界状态时失败,特别是单样本数据。
■在这项研究中,与每次需要多个样本的传统方法不同,一种无模型的计算方法,单样本马尔可夫流熵(SMFE),为复杂疾病的临界状态/疾病前状态的识别问题提供了解决方案,仅基于单个样本。我们提出的方法是从网络熵的角度来表征复杂疾病的动态变化。
■通过从癌症基因组图谱(TCGA)数据库中的四个肿瘤数据集明确识别疾病恶化发生之前的临界状态来验证所提出的方法。此外,两个新的预后生物标志物,乐观sMFE(O-sMFE)和悲观sMFE(P-sMFE)生物标志物,通过我们的方法鉴定,并使肿瘤的预后评估成为可能。
■所提出的方法已显示出其能够准确检测四种癌症的疾病前状态,并提供两种新的预后生物标志物,O-sMFE和P-sMFE生物标志物,有利于患者的个性化预后。这是一项了不起的成就,可能对复杂疾病的诊断和治疗产生重大影响。
The progression of complex diseases sometimes undergoes a drastic critical transition, at which the biological system abruptly shifts from a relatively healthy state (before-transition stage) to a disease state (after-transition stage). Searching for such a critical transition or critical state is crucial to provide timely and effective scientific treatment to patients. However, in most conditions where only a small sample size of clinical data is available, resulting in failure when detecting the critical states of complex diseases, particularly only single-sample data.
In this study, different from traditional methods that require multiple samples at each time, a model-free computational method, single-sample Markov flow entropy (sMFE), provides a solution to the identification problem of critical states/pre-disease states of complex diseases, solely based on a single-sample. Our proposed method was employed to characterize the dynamic changes of complex diseases from the perspective of network entropy.
The proposed approach was verified by unmistakably identifying the critical state just before the occurrence of disease deterioration for four tumor datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. In addition, two new prognostic biomarkers, optimistic sMFE (O-sMFE) and pessimistic sMFE (P-sMFE) biomarkers, were identified by our method and enable the prognosis evaluation of tumors.
The proposed method has shown its capability to accurately detect pre-disease states of four cancers and provide two novel prognostic biomarkers, O-sMFE and P-sMFE biomarkers, to facilitate the personalized prognosis of patients. This is a remarkable achievement that could have a major impact on the diagnosis and treatment of complex diseases.