Evidence map›Paper›PMID 40802546›Full record

ArticleBioinformatics (Oxford, England)2025

HallmarkGraph: a cancer hallmark informed graph neural network for classifying hierarchical tumor subtypes.

Qingsong Zhang, Fei Liu, Xin Lai

Abstract read
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Article in Bioinformatics (Oxford, England), 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.

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3citing papers in PubMed
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1 · What the graph read from it

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3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

3 citing papers in PubMed.

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4 · The record

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5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Qingsong ZhangSchool of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510006, China.
Fei LiuSchool of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510006, China.ORCID 0000-0001-9415-0496
Xin LaiSystems and Network Medicine Lab, Biomedicine Unit, Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, Tampere University, Tampere, 33520, Finland.ORCID 0000-0003-4913-5822

Funding

Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation 2024A1515010900National Natural Science Foundation of China 62273153
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

motivationAccurate tumor subtype diagnosis is crucial for precision oncology, yet current methodologies face significant challenges. These include balancing model accuracy with interpretability and the high costs of generating multi-omics data in clinical settings. Moreover, there is a lack of validated models capable of classifying hierarchical tumor subtypes across a comprehensive pan-cancer cohort.

resultsWe present a graph neural network, HallmarkGraph, the first biologically informed model developed to classify hierarchical tumor subtypes in human cancer. Inspired by cancer hallmarks, the model's architecture integrates transcriptome profiles and gene regulatory interactions to perform multi-label classification. We evaluate the model on a comprehensive pan-cancer cohort comprising 11 476 samples from 26 primary cancers with 405 subtypes up to eight levels. The model demonstrates exceptional performance, achieving 5-fold cross-validation accuracy between 85% and 99% for tumor subtypes labeled with increasing details of genomic information. It also shows good generalizability on a validation dataset of 887 samples, assessed using three metrics that consider tumor subtypes at individual, combined, and sample levels. Benchmarking and ablation experiments show that hallmark-based embeddings slightly influence model performance, while the integrated multilayer perceptron plays a significant role in determining classifier accuracy. Additionally, we use the SHAP method to link cancer hallmarks with genes, identifying key features that influence model decisions. Our findings present a biologically informed machine learning framework capable of tracking tumor transcriptomic trajectories and distinguishing inter- and intra-tumor heterogeneity in pan-cancer. This approach holds promise for enhancing cancer diagnostics. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: HallmarkGraph is accessible at https://github.com/laixn/HallmarkGraph.

Indexed as

NeoplasmsNeural Networks, ComputerAlgorithmsComputational BiologyGene Expression ProfilingGraph Neural NetworksHumansTranscriptome

Identifiers

PMID40802546
PMCPMC12401579

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.