Katz Kernel Based Stratification of Breast Cancer Patients

원문 초록

The integration of mechanistic signaling networks into clinical research has become a cornerstone of precision oncology. By capturing the complex biochemical interactions within a cell, these networks provide a functional map of disease progression that goes beyond simple genomic mutations. Consequently, the development of specific signaling models of patients has significant relevance, allowing for a more granular representation of individual disease profiles. In this setting, there is a growing need for robust methodologies capable of comparing graph based pathway structures to identify similarities and differences across patient cohorts. Such comparisons are essential for the identification of clinically meaningful subgroups, and the discovery of novel biomarkers. Standard graph kernels, while mathematically rigorous, often remain too generic for this purpose. They frequently fail to capture features specific to gene signaling networks, resulting in suboptimal clustering performance. In this paper, we present a domain specific graph kernel designed for mechanistic signaling networks. Unlike generic approaches, our method explicitly incorporates biological constraints and gene interaction patterns into the kernel formulation, enabling a more accurate characterization of both topological structure and functional behavior. We assess its performance on breast cancer datasets, focusing on its ability to support disease subtyping. Our results suggest that our approach can effectively contribute to patient stratification.