Recognition of early and late stages of bladder cancer using metabolites and machine learning

We explored metabolic pathways related to early-stage BCa (Galactose metabolism and Starch and sucrose metabolism) and to late-stage BCa (Glycine, serine, and threonine metabolism, Arginine and proline metabolism, Glycerophospholipid metabolism, and Galactose metabolism) as well as those common to both stages pathways. The central metabolite impacting the most cancerogenic genes (AKT, EGFR, MAPK3) in early stage is d-glucose, while late-stage BCa is characterized by significant fold changes in several metabolites: glycerol, choline, 13(S)-hydroxyoctadecadienoic acid, 2′-fucosyllactose. Insulin was also seen to play an important role in late stages of BCa. The best performing model was able to predict metabolite class with an accuracy of 82.54% and the area under precision-recall curve (PRC) of 0.84 on the training set. The same model was applied to three separate sets of metabolites obtained from public sources, one set of the late-stage metabolites and two sets of the early-stage metabolites.