PR-NET: Leveraging Pathway Refined Network Structures for Prostate Cancer Patient Condition Prediction

The diagnosis and monitoring of Castrate Resistant Prostate Cancer (CRPC) are crucial for cancer patients, but the current models (such as P-NET) have limitations in terms of parameter count, generalization, and cost. To address the issue, we develop a more accurate and efficient Prostate Cancer patient condition prediction model, named PR-NET. By compressing and optimizing the network structure of P-NET, the model complexity is reduced while maintaining high accuracy and interpretability. The PR-NET demonstrated superior performance in predicting prostate cancer patient outcomes, outshining P-NET and six other traditional models with a significant margin. In our rigorous evaluation, PR-NET not only achieved impressive average AUC and Recall scores of 0.94 and 0.83, respectively, on known data but also maintained robust generalizability on five unknown datasets with a higher average AUC of 0.73 and Recall of 0.72, compared to P-NET's 0.68 and 0.5. PR-NET's efficiency was evidenced by its shorter average training and inference times, and its gene-level analysis revealed 46 key genes, demonstrating its enhanced predictive power and efficiency in identifying critical biomarkers for prostate cancer. Future research can further expand its application domains and optimize the model's performance and reliability.