A graph neural network model for the diagnosis of lung adenocarcinoma based on multimodal features and an edge-generation network

Background: Lung cancer is a global disease with high lethality, with early screening being considerably helpful for improving the 5-year survival rate. Multimodality features in early screening imaging are an important part of the prediction for lung adenocarcinoma, and establishing a model for adenocarcinoma diagnosis based on multimodal features is an obvious clinical need. Through our practice and investigation, we found that graph neural networks (GNNs) are excellent platforms for multimodal feature fusion, and the data can be completed using the edge-generation network. Therefore, we propose a new lung adenocarcinoma multiclassification model based on multimodal features and an edge-generation network. Methods: According to a ratio of 80% to 20%, respectively, the dataset of 338 cases was divided into the training set and the test set through 5-fold cross-validation, and the distribution of the 2 sets was the same. First, the regions of interest (ROIs) cropped from computed tomography (CT) images were separately fed into convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and radiomics processing platforms. The results of the 2 parts were then input into a graph embedding representation network to obtain the fused feature vectors. Subsequently, a graph database based on the clinical and semantic features was established, and the data were supplemented by an edge-generation network, with the fused feature vectors being used as the input of the nodes. This enabled us to clearly understand where the information transmission of the GNN takes place and improves the interpretability of the model. Finally, the nodes were classified using GNNs. Results: On our dataset, the proposed method presented in this paper achieved superior results compared to traditional methods and showed some comparability with state- of- the-art methods for lung nodule classification. The results of our method are as follows: accuracy (ACC) =66.26% (+/- 4.46%), area under the curve (AUC) =75.86% (+/- 1.79%), F1-score =64.00% (+/- 3.65%), and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) = 48.40% (+/- 5.07%). The model with the edge-generating network consistently outperformed the model without it in all aspects. Conclusions: The experiments demonstrate that with appropriate data=construction methods GNNs can outperform traditional image processing methods in the field of CT-based medical image classification. Additionally, our model has higher interpretability, as it employs subjective clinical and semantic features as the data construction approach. This will help doctors better leverage human-computer interactions.