UC Irvine

Background & aims

Liver disease carries significant healthcare burden and frequently requires a combination of blood tests, imaging, and invasive liver biopsy to diagnose. Distinguishing between inflammatory liver diseases, which may have similar clinical presentations, is particularly challenging. In this study, we implemented a machine learning pipeline for the identification of diagnostic gene expression biomarkers across several alcohol-associated and non-alcohol-associated liver diseases, using either liver tissue or blood-based samples.

Methods

We collected peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and liver tissue samples from participants with alcohol-associated hepatitis (AH), alcohol-associated cirrhosis (AC), non-alcohol-associated fatty liver disease, chronic HCV infection, and healthy controls. We performed RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) on 137 PBMC samples and 67 liver tissue samples. Using gene expression data, we implemented a machine learning feature selection and classification pipeline to identify diagnostic biomarkers which distinguish between the liver disease groups. The liver tissue results were validated using a public independent RNA-seq dataset. The biomarkers were computationally validated for biological relevance using pathway analysis tools.

Results

Utilizing liver tissue RNA-seq data, we distinguished between AH, AC, and healthy conditions with overall accuracies of 90% in our dataset, and 82% in the independent dataset, with 33 genes. Distinguishing 4 liver conditions and healthy controls yielded 91% overall accuracy in our liver tissue dataset with 39 genes, and 75% overall accuracy in our PBMC dataset with 75 genes.

Conclusions

Our machine learning pipeline was effective at identifying a small set of diagnostic gene biomarkers and classifying several liver diseases using RNA-seq data from liver tissue and PBMCs. The methodologies implemented and genes identified in this study may facilitate future efforts toward a liquid biopsy diagnostic for liver diseases.

Lay summary

Distinguishing between inflammatory liver diseases without multiple tests can be challenging due to their clinically similar characteristics. To lay the groundwork for the development of a non-invasive blood-based diagnostic across a range of liver diseases, we compared samples from participants with alcohol-associated hepatitis, alcohol-associated cirrhosis, chronic hepatitis C infection, and non-alcohol-associated fatty liver disease. We used a machine learning computational approach to demonstrate that gene expression data generated from either liver tissue or blood samples can be used to discover a small set of gene biomarkers for effective diagnosis of these liver diseases.