Cancer diagnosis

Detecting tumours earlier and more precisely could lead to more effective treatment.

Increasingly sensitive tests have raised the risk overdiagnosis. Understanding a person’s chance of disease could reduce the harmful side effects of screening.

When should people start being screened for breast cancer? Laura Esserman details the efforts being made to find out.

Tests that capture tumour signatures in the blood have the potential to detect cancer before symptoms appear.

The analysis of tumours using biomarkers in blood is beginning to transform cancer diagnosis, says Catherine Alix-Panabières. The challenge now is to make liquid biopsy a standard clinical tool.

Genome sequencing is providing physicians with more data about the causes of cancer and changing the way some forms of the disease are treated.

The cancer is often only found after it has spread and when treatment options are limited.

Artificial intelligence can spot subtle patterns that can easily be missed by humans.

Programmes to catch cancers early are on the increase in low- and middle-income countries, but some face cultural and logistical challenges.

Cancer traps, artificial intelligence and other highlights from clinical trials and laboratory studies.

The implementation of screening tests for certain cancers has led to the phenomenon of overdiagnosis, whereby a cancer is diagnosed that would otherwise not go on to cause symptoms or death. This Opinion article discusses the effects of overdiagnosis and emerging strategies to reduce overdiagnosis of indolent cancers through an understanding of tumour biology and the tumour microenvironment.

An artificial intelligence-powered microscope able to detect tumor cells in histopathology slides holds promise for accelerating pathology workflows for cancer diagnosis

A convolutional neural network performs automated prediction of malignancy risk of pulmonary nodules in chest CT scan volumes and improves accuracy of lung cancer screening.

Interval invasive breast cancers diagnosed after a normal mammogram but before the next screening examination have a different tumour biology from that of screen-detected breast cancers, and thus are not detected on mammography. Understanding the genetics and biology of interval invasive cancers could inform better approaches to detection.

Identification and sequencing of circulating tumour DNA in the cerebrospinal fluid of patients with glioma.

Diehn and colleagues report that assaying circulating DNA in patients receiving chemoradiation therapy for non-small-cell lung cancer could identify the patients most likely to benefit from consolidation immunotherapy.

Direct prospective comparison of circulating tumor DNA and tissue biopsy sequencing shows the superiority of liquid biopsies for capturing clinically relevant alterations mediating resistance to targeted therapies in cancer patients.