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Artificial intelligence-assisted proteomic signatures for discriminating malignant from benign pulmonary nodules

delete2026-07-29
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PRE
AI
J
Juan Luo
Q
Qiongye Dong
J
Jianyi Yang
H
Hui Shan
Q
Qianqian Zhong
Y
Yongjian Zhang
王光熙 cover
王光熙 (Guangxi Wang) *
J
Jixian Liu *
Y
Yuxin Yin *
DOI:10.1016/j.trsl.2026.07.013delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Lung cancer remains a major global health burden. Although low-dose CT (LDCT) is effective for early detection, its clinical application is limited by a high false-positive rate and the need for subsequent invasive confirmation, such as biopsy. Meanwhile, the extensive protein-level alterations as observed in lung cancer provide a rationale for developing minimally invasive plasma proteomics-based screening a panel of biomarkers. In the study, untargeted proteomic profiling was performed on a tissue cohort (n=61, paired tumor and normal adjacent tissue samples spanning pre-invasive (AAH/AIS), MIA and IAC), a discovery plasma cohort (n=221), and an independent validation plasma cohort (n=144). Integrative tissue-plasma analysis was used to identify concordant proteins. Classifier training was conducted in the plasma proteomics through a LightGBM-based pipeline with a two-stage feature selection strategy to derive plasma protein panels and construct binary classifiers that distinguish malignant from benign nodules. The diagnostic performance of the trained models was then evaluated in an independent validation cohort. Furthermore, binary classifiers were constructed to discriminate lesion invasiveness among LUADs. A subset of proteins was identified whose expression in both tissue and plasma is significantly associated with tumor invasiveness. The compact pipeline identified reproducible plasma protein panels and trained LightGBM classifiers that robustly discriminated malignant from benign pulmonary nodules. The classifiers maintained strong performance in the independent validation cohort (AUC-ROC: 0.949∼0.986). We developed separate classification models to stratify lung adenocarcinoma subtypes by distinct patterns of invasiveness (AUC-ROC: 0.762∼0.803). High-depth proteomics combined with LightGBM enables the identification of robust plasma protein panels for discriminating pulmonary nodules and stratifying invasiveness. This generalizable strategy, along with reproducible biomarker panels, supports non-invasive early diagnosis of lung adenocarcinoma.

Journal

Translational Research cover
Translational Research
IF:
5.9
Papers:
2.0K
Citations:
7.1K

Organization

P
Peking University Shenzhen Hospital
Scholars:
693
Papers: 217
Citations: 4.1K
P
Peking University Health Science Center
Scholars:
107
Papers: 35
Citations: 0
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