Background:It is found that the prognosis of gliomas of the same grade has
large differences among World Health Organization (WHO) grade II and III in clinical
observation. Therefore, a better understanding of the genetics and molecular mechanisms
underlying WHO grade II and III gliomas is required, with the aim of developing a classification
scheme at the molecular level rather than the conventional pathological morphology
level.Method:We performed survival analysis combined with machine learning methods of
Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator using expression datasets downloaded
from the Chinese Glioma Genome Atlas as well as The Cancer Genome Atlas. Risk
scores were calculated by the product of expression level of overall survival-related genes
and their multivariate Cox proportional hazards regression coefficients. WHO grade II
and III gliomas were categorized into the low-risk subgroup, medium-risk subgroup, and
high-risk subgroup. We used the 16 prognostic-related genes as input features to build a
classification model based on prognosis using a fully connected neural network. Gene
function annotations were also performed.Results:The 16 genes (AKNAD1, C7orf13, CDK20, CHRFAM7A, CHRNA1, EFNB1,
GAS1, HIST2H2BE, KCNK3, KLHL4, LRRK2, NXPH3, PIGZ, SAMD5, ERINC2, and
SIX6) related to the glioma prognosis were screened. The 16 selected genes were associated
with the development of gliomas and carcinogenesis. The accuracy of an external
validation data set of the fully connected neural network model from the two cohorts
reached 95.5%. Our method has good potential capability in classifying WHO grade II
and III gliomas into low-risk, medium-risk, and high-risk subgroups. The subgroups
showed significant (P<0.01) differences in overall survival.Conclusion:This resulted in the identification of 16 genes that were related to the prognosis
of gliomas. Here we developed a computational method to discriminate WHO grade
II and III gliomas into three subgroups with distinct prognoses. The gene expressionbased
method provides a reliable alternative to determine the prognosis of gliomas.