A new complementary approach to endoscopy for esophageal cancer diagnosis.
42 Background: For esophageal cancer, no viable non-invasive detection technologies are available today. In earlier investigations, Cancer Differentiation Analysis (CDA) Technology which measures information relating to both protein fragments and cellular signals in blood samples in a single test has showed a significant advantage in esophageal cancer diagnosis. Methods: Blood samples from 105 individuals in EDTA tubes were collected from Shanghai Changhai Hospital, China, between July and December 2014, CDA and endoscopy tests were carried out on all samples before clinically diagnosed. A performance predication model of CDA and endoscopy test results was built using pROC package in R Language for the data of Area Under the Curve (AUC) and CDA threshold values. Further analysis was carried out based on the CDA threshold values. Results: Out of the 105 individuals, samples from 6 individuals diagnosed as esophageal benign diseases were selected as control group. 99 samples from individuals diagnosed as esophageal cancer, of which 3 and 82 cases were adenocarcinoma and squamous carcinoma, 2, 26, 33, 31 and 7 cases were classified as stage 0,I,II, III, IV, respectively. Details of AUC results of endoscopy, and CDA plus endoscopy for each group were given in Table 1 below. Conclusions: Even though the sensitivity of the endoscopy is usually high due to its pathological examination, this investigation showed that CDA technology could further enhance the diagnosis sensitivity of endoscope, especially for early stage of esophageal cancer, and it (CDA) can be an effective complementary tool to clinical diagnosis and operation determination while obtaining the pathological information via endoscopy. In conclusion, CDA technology is of great value in esophageal diagnosis and therapeutic decision-making. [Table: see text]