Predicting lymph node metastasis and prognosis of individual cancer patients based on miRNA-mediated RNA interactions

Lymph node metastasis is usually detected based on the images obtained from clinical examinations. Detecting lymph node metastasis from clinical examinations is a direct way of diagnosing metastasis, but the diagnosis is done after lymph node metastasis occurs.

We developed a new method for predicting lymph node metastasis based on differential correlations of miRNA-mediated RNA interactions in cancer. The types of RNAs considered in this study include mRNAs, lncRNAs, miRNAs, and pseudogenes. We constructed cancer patient-specific networks of miRNA mediated RNA interactions and identified key miRNA-RNA pairs from the network. A prediction model using differential correlations of the miRNA-RNA pairs of a patient as features showed a much higher performance than other methods which use gene expression data. The key miRNA-RNA pairs were also powerful in predicting prognosis of an individual patient in several types of cancer.

Differential correlations of miRNA-RNA pairs identified from patient-specific networks of miRNA mediated RNA interactions are powerful in predicting lymph node metastasis in cancer patients. The key miRNA-RNA pairs were also powerful in predicting prognosis of an individual patient of solid cancer.