Explainable AI for Estimating Pathogenicity of Genetic Variants Using Large-Scale Knowledge Graphs

Simple Summary To treat diseases caused by genetic mutations, such as mutations in genes and cancer cells, genomic medicine is being promoted to identify disease-causing variants in individual patients using comprehensive genetic analysis (next-generation sequencing, or NGS) for diagnosis and treatment. However, clinical interpretation of the large amount of variant data output by NGS is a time-consuming task and has become a bottleneck in the promotion of genomic medicine. Although AI development to support this task has been conducted in various fields, none has yet been realized that has both high estimation accuracy and explainability at the same time. Therefore, we propose an AI with high estimation accuracy and explanatory power, which will eliminate the bottlenecks in genomic medicine. Background: To treat diseases caused by genetic variants, it is necessary to identify disease-causing variants in patients. However, since there are a large number of disease-causing variants, the application of AI is required. We propose AI to solve this problem and report the results of its application in identifying disease-causing variants. Methods: To assist physicians in their task of identifying disease-causing variants, we propose an explainable AI (XAI) that combines high estimation accuracy with explainability using a knowledge graph. We integrated databases for genomic medicine and constructed a large knowledge graph that was used to achieve the XAI. Results: We compared our XAI with random forests and decision trees. Conclusion: We propose an XAI that uses knowledge graphs for explanation. The proposed method achieves high estimation performance and explainability. This will support the promotion of genomic medicine.