Early multi-cancer detection through deep learning: An anomaly detection approach using Variational Autoencoder

Cancer is a disease that causes many deaths worldwide. The treatment of cancer is first and foremost a matter of detection, a treatment that is most effective when the disease is detected at an early stage. With the evolution of technology, several computer-aided diagnosis tools have been developed around cancer; several image-based cancer detection methods have been developed too. However, cancer detection faces many difficulties related to early detection which is crucial for patient survival rate. To detect cancer early, scientists have been using transcriptomic data. However, this presents some challenges such as unlabeled data, a large amount of data, and image-based techniques that only focus on one type of cancer. The purpose of this work is to develop a deep learning model that can effectively detect as soon as possible, specifically in the early stages, any type of cancer as an anomaly in transcriptomic data. This model must have the ability to act independently and not be restricted to any specific type of cancer. To achieve this goal, we modeled a deep neural network (a Variational Autoencoder) and then defined an algorithm for detecting anomalies in the output of the Variational Autoencoder. The Variational Autoencoder consists of an encoder and a decoder with a hidden layer. With the TCGA and GTEx data, we were able to train the model for six types of cancer using the Adam optimizer with decay learning for training, and a two-component loss function. As a result, we obtained the lowest value of accuracy 0.950, and the lowest value of recall 0.830. This research leads us to the design of a deep learning model for the detection of cancer as an anomaly in transcriptomic data.