Machine learning based detection of pancreatic tumors using the Dxcover® cancer platform

Pancreatic cancer is the 7th most deadly cancer worldwide with over 460,000 victims per year. In the current diagnostic pathway, carbohydrate antigen (CA) 19-9 serum test is the first method used for detection of pancreatic cancer; although, with poor positive predictive values reported, it cannot provide certain information about the presence of a pancreatic tumor or other surrounding tumors in symptomatic patients. Attenuated total reflection - Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) has demonstrated exceptional potential in human blood serum analysis for cancer diagnostics and its implementation in the clinical environment could represent a significant step forward in the early detection of pancreatic cancer. This proof-of-concept study was focused on the discrimination between both cancer versus healthy control samples, and cancer versus symptomatic control samples from patients with comorbidities and/or confounding diseases. The study aimed to investigate the use of the Dxcover® cancer platform as a novel approach for pancreatic cancer detection. Various machine learning algorithms were applied to discriminate between cancer (n=100) and healthy control samples (n=100), achieving results amounting to a sensitivity of 91.0 ± 5.6%, specificity of 87.6 ± 5.8%, and accuracy of 89.3 ± 3.8% with partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). Moreover, an area under the curve (AUC) equal to 0.9536 was obtained through receiving operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. The same algorithms were also applied to discriminate between cancer (n=35) and symptomatic control samples (n=35) achieving a balanced sensitivity and specificity over 75% with an AUC of 0.8436. Both discriminations underwent bootstrapping validation and were proven statistically significant. Herein, we present these results and demonstrate that ATR-FTIR spectroscopic analysis of serum is a cost-effective, minimally invasive, highly sensitive and specific test for detection of pancreatic cancer.