Screening gene signatures for clinical response subtypes of lung transplantation

Lung is the most important organ in the human respiratory system, whose normal functions are quite essential for human beings. Under certain pathological conditions, the normal lung functions could no longer be maintained in patients, and lung transplantation is generally applied to ease patients' breathing and prolong their lives. However, several risk factors exist during and after lung transplantation, including bleeding, infection, and transplant rejections. In particular, transplant rejections are difficult to predict or prevent, leading to the most dangerous complications and severe status in patients undergoing lung transplantation. Given that most common monitoring and validation methods for lung transplantation rejections may take quite a long time and have low reproducibility, new technologies and methods are required to improve the efficacy and accuracy of rejection monitoring after lung transplantation. Recently, one previous study set up the gene expression profiles of patients who underwent lung transplantation. However, it did not provide a tool to predict lung transplantation responses. Here, a further deep investigation was conducted on such profiling data. A computational framework, incorporating several machine learning algorithms, such as feature selection methods and classification algorithms, was built to establish an effective prediction model distinguishing patient into different clinical subgroups, corresponding to different rejection responses after lung transplantation. Furthermore, the framework also screened essential genes with functional enrichments and create quantitative rules for the distinction of patients with different rejection responses to lung transplantation. The outcome of this contribution could provide guidelines for clinical treatment of each rejection subtype and contribute to the revealing of complicated rejection mechanisms of lung transplantation.