Abstract

ABSTRACT

Background: 

Routine health checkup is an essential strategy for monitoring population health and maintaining healthy workforces. However, there was a lack of cancer screening tests among routine health checkups due to high costs and unreliable methods.

Methods: 

We conducted a two-stage study to evaluate the value of a blood test, Cancer Differentiation Analysis (CDA™ ), which is developed to differentiate the blood samples of healthy individuals from those of cancer patients through measuring and analyzing multiple biophysical properties.

Results: 

The first stage of a cross-sectional study included 75,942 healthy individuals in routine health checkup and the second stage of a prospective population-based cohort which included 1,957 healthy community members. Forty-eight and ten cancer cases were identified among cross-sectional study and prospective population-based cohort, respectively. Using a pre-determined cutoff, we found that the CDA™ test could differentiate blood samples between healthy and cancer individuals with >93% specificity and >55% sensitivity in both studies.

Conclusions: 

With high specificity and moderate sensitivity of CDA™ test, our study indicates that we can analyze biophysical properties in the blood to rapidly and reliably screen healthy individuals from cancer patients in a health checkup setting where most individuals are healthy or with average risk of cancer.

Keywords: 

Cancer screening; Blood, Biophysical property, Sensitivity; Specificity.

• Li Xie, Xuedong Du, Suna Wang, Peng Shi, Ying Qian, Weituo Zhang, Xing Tang, Yue Lin, Jie Chen, Lan Peng, Chris Chang Yu & Biyun Qian (2021): Development and evaluation of cancer differentiation analysis technology: a novel biophysics-based cancer screening method, Expert Review of Molecular Diagnostics, DOI: 10.1080/14737159.2021.2013201