Abstract
The NLRP3 inflammasome, regulated by TLR4, plays a pivotal role in periodontitis by mediating inflammatory cytokine release and bone loss induced by Porphyromonas gingivalis. Periodontal disease creates a hypoxic environment, favoring anaerobic bacteria survival and exacerbating inflammation. The NLRP3 inflammasome triggers pyroptosis, a programmed cell death that amplifies inflammation and tissue damage. This study evaluates the efficacy of Variational Graph Autoencoders (VGAEs) in reconstructing gene data related to NLRP3-mediated pyroptosis in periodontitis. The NCBI GEO dataset GSE262663, containing three samples with and without hypoxia exposure, was analyzed using unsupervised K-means clustering. This method identifies natural groupings within biological data without prior labels. VGAE, a deep learning model, captures complex graph relationships for tasks like link prediction and edge detection. The VGAE model demonstrated exceptional performance with an accuracy of 99.42% and perfect precision. While it identified 5,820 false negatives, indicating a conservative approach, it accurately predicted 4,080 out of 9,900 positive samples. The model's latent space distribution differed significantly from the original data, suggesting a tightly clustered representation of the gene expression patterns. K-means clustering and VGAE show promise in gene expression analysis and graph structure reconstruction for periodontitis research.