Females and Males Show Differences in Early-Stage Transcriptomic Biomarkers of Lung Adenocarcinoma and Lung Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Abstract

The incidence and mortality rates of lung cancers are different between females and males. Therefore, sex information should be an important part of how to train and optimize a diagnostic model. However, most of the existing studies do not fully utilize this information. This study carried out a comparative investigation between sex-specific models and sex-independent models. Three feature selection algorithms and five classifiers were utilized to evaluate the contribution of the sex information to the detection of early-stage lung cancers. Both lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) and lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC) showed that the sex-specific models outperformed the sex-independent detection of early-stage lung cancers. The Venn plots suggested that females and males shared only a few transcriptomic biomarkers of early-stage lung cancers. Our experimental data suggested that sex information should be included in optimizing disease diagnosis models.

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“…Possible explanations were tried to be given in terms of both genetic and behavioural differences between the sexes. Females and males differ in early-stage transcriptomic biomarkers and cell-lineage gene of squamous NSCLC [ 40 ]. For instance, the sex-determining region Y-Box 2 (SOX2) [ 41 ] is a potential cell lineage gene highly expressed in the pathogenesis of squamous NSCLC.…”