Predicting Cancer Types From miRNA Stem-loops Using Deep Learning

With cancer being one of the main remaining challenges of modern medicine, a lot of effort is put towards oncology research. Since early diagnosis is a highly important factor for the treatment of many types of cancer, screening tests have become a popular research subject. Technical and technological advances have brought down the price of genome sequencing and have led to an increase in understanding the relationship between DNA, RNA and tumor sites. These advances have sparked an interest in personalized and precision medicine research. In this work, we propose a deep neural network classifier to identify the anatomical site of a tumor. Using 27 TCGA miRNA stem-loops cohorts, we classify tumors in 20 anatomical sites with a 96.9% accuracy. Our results demonstrate the possibility of using stem-loop expression data for accurate cancer localization.