Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), comprising Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC), exhibits molecular heterogeneity that complicates diagnosis. This study proposes an integrated deep learning and bioinformatics framework to uncover molecular pathways and identify potential therapeutic targets. The dataset includes 156 CD patients, 167 UC patients and 267 healthy controls. The Graph Attention Network (GAT) is applied to protein–protein interaction (PPI) networks for embedding the node features and reweighting edges based on learned attention scores. The Louvain algorithm on the embedded PPI network identifies the top 10 communities. Functional enrichment analysis of the genes within these communities reveals significantly enriched in immune responses, stress responses and pathogen-associated pathways. From these communities, 32 hub genes are identified as being implicated in IBD pathogenesis. The machine learning classifiers logistic regression, support vector machine, random forest, gradient boosting and a stacking classifier are applied to 32 genes to distinguish between CD and UC. Based on classification performance and statistical significance, 10 highly significant genes TLR5, TLR2, IL1B, IL4R, TLR4, IL18, STAT3, STAT1, IL18RAP and IFNGR1 are selected. Furthermore, the KEGG pathway analysis of the 32 genes shows that five of these genes (STAT1, STAT3, IL4R, IL18 and TLR2) are directly involved in IBD-related pathways. Experimental validation of five key genes using qRT-PCR in HCT116 cells confirms significant upregulation of these genes. Modularity and NMI scores demonstrate that the GAT-based framework achieves superior community detection performance compared to baseline methods. This approach gives a scalable and robust strategy for advancing biomarker discovery and personalized therapy in complex diseases like IBD.
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