# Advanced artificial intelligence in piRNA and PIWI-like protein research: A systematic review of recurrent neural networks, long short-term memory, and emerging computational techniques

**Authors:** Jheremy Sebastián Reyes, Jhonathan David Guevara, Laura Tatiana Picón, Iris Lorena Sánchez, Libia Adriana Gaona, María Paula Montoya, Luis Eduardo Pino

PMC · DOI: 10.7705/biomedica.7660 · Biomédica · 2025-12-10

## TL;DR

This paper reviews AI models for detecting piRNAs and their role in cancer, finding that LSTM and GCN models perform best.

## Contribution

A systematic evaluation of AI models for piRNA detection and their implications in cancer diagnostics.

## Key findings

- LSTM models achieved the highest accuracy (92.3%) in piRNA detection.
- GCNs outperformed others in identifying piRNA-disease associations with complex data.
- SVMs were effective for small datasets but lacked scalability.

## Abstract

PIWI-interacting RNAs are small and non-coding RNAs involved in gene regulation and transposable element repression, emerging as critical biomarkers and therapeutic targets in oncology. Advances in artificial intelligence, such as recurrent neural networks, long short-term memory networks, and graph convolutional networks, offer significant improvements in PIWI-interacting RNA detection.

To evaluate the performance of artificial intelligence models, including recurrent neural networks, long short-term memory, and graph convolutional networks, in detecting PIWI-interacting RNAs and assessing their implications for cancer diagnostics and prognosis.

A systematic review of 24 studies was conducted across PubMed, ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Web of Science, focusing on artificial intelligence-based approaches for PIWI-interacting RNA detection. Inclusion criteria were original articles published in English or Spanish using artificial intelligence models in clinical or experimental settings. Performance metrics such as accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity were analyzed.

Long short-term memory models achieved the highest overall accuracy (92.3%), followed by graph convolutional networks (91.4%), support vector machines (88%), and recurrent neural networks (85.7%). Sensitivity and specificity were also highest in long short-term memory (94% and 91%, respectively). Graph convolutional networks showed superior performance in identifying PIWI-interacting RNA-disease associations with complex datasets. Support vector machine models were effective in smaller datasets but exhibited scalability limitations.

Artificial intelligence models, especially long short-term memory and graph convolutional networks, significantly enhance PIWI-interacting RNA detection, supporting their application in cancer diagnostics and personalized medicine. Future studies should refine these models, address dataset biases, and explore their integration into clinical workflows.

## Linked entities

- **Diseases:** cancer (MONDO:0004992)

## Full-text entities

- **Genes:** PIWIL1 (piwi like RNA-mediated gene silencing 1) [NCBI Gene 9271] {aka CT80.1, HIWI, MIWI, PIWI}
- **Diseases:** cancer (MESH:D009369)

## Full text

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## Figures

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## References

46 references — full list in the complete paper: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12904106/full.md

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12904106