Interpreting biologically informed neural networks for enhanced biomarker discovery and pathway analysis

The advent of novel methods in mass spectrometry-based proteomics allows for the identification of biomarkers and biological pathways which are crucial for the understanding of complex diseases. However, contemporary analytical methods often omit essential information, such as protein abundance and protein co-regulation, and therefore miss crucial relationships in the data. Here, we introduce a generalized workflow that incorporates proteins, their abundances, and associated pathways into a deep learning-based methodology to improve biomarker identification and pathway analysis through the creation and interpretation of biologically informed neural networks (BINNs). We successfully employ BINNs to differentiate between two subphenotypes of septic acute kidney injury (AKI) and COVID-19 from the plasma proteome and utilize feature attribution-methods to introspect the networks to identify which proteins and pathways are important for distinguishing between subphenotypes. Compared to existing methods, BINNs achieved the highest predictive accuracy and revealed that metabolic processes were key to differentiating between septic AKI subphenotypes, while the immune system was more important to the classification of COVID-19 subphenotypes. The methodology behind creating, interpreting, and visualizing BINNs were implemented in a free and open source Python-package: https://github.com/InfectionMedicineProteomics/BINN .