Machine learning based tissue analysis reveals Brachyury has a diagnosis value in breast cancer

The aim of the present study was to confirm the role of Brachyury in breast cancer and to verify whether four types of machine learning models can use Brachyury expression to predict the survival of patients.

We conducted a retrospective review of the medical records to obtain patient information, and made the patient's paraffin tissue into tissue chips for staining analysis. We selected 303 patients for research and implemented four machine learning algorithms, including multivariate logistic regression model, decision tree, artificial neural network and random forest, and compared the results of these models with each other. Area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) was used to compare the results.

The chi-square test results of relevant data suggested that the expression of Brachyury protein in cancer tissues was significantly higher than that in paracancerous tissues (P=0.0335); patients with breast cancer with high Brachyury expression had a worse overall survival (OS) compared with patients with low Brachyury expression. We also found that Brachyury expression was associated with ER expression (P=0.0489). Subsequently, we used four machine learning models to verify the relationship between Brachyury expression and the survival of patients with breast cancer. The results showed that the decision tree model had the best performance (AUC = 0.781).

Brachyury is highly expressed in breast cancer and indicates that patients had a poor prognosis. Compared with conventional statistical methods, decision tree model shows superior performance in predicting the survival status of patients with breast cancer.