Detecting malignant dynamics on very few blood sample using signature coefficients

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Vaucher, Rémi, Chrétien, Stéphane
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Vaucher, Rémi
Chrétien, Stéphane
author_facet Vaucher, Rémi
Chrétien, Stéphane
contents Recent discoveries have suggested that the promising avenue of using circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) levels in blood samples provides reasonable accuracy for cancer monitoring, with extremely low burden on the patient's side. It is known that the presence of ctDNA can result from various mechanisms leading to DNA release from cells, such as apoptosis, necrosis or active secretion. One key idea in recent cancer monitoring studies is that monitoring the dynamics of ctDNA levels might be sufficient for early multi-cancer detection. This interesting idea has been turned into commercial products, e.g. in the company named GRAIL. In the present work, we propose to explore the use of Signature theory for detecting aggressive cancer tumors based on the analysis of blood samples. Our approach combines tools from continuous time Markov modelling for the dynamics of ctDNA levels in the blood, with Signature theory for building efficient testing procedures. Signature theory is a topic of growing interest in the Machine Learning community (see Chevyrev2016 and Fermanian2021), which is now recognised as a powerful feature extraction tool for irregularly sampled signals. The method proposed in the present paper is shown to correctly address the challenging problem of overcoming the inherent data scarsity due to the extremely small number of blood samples per patient. The relevance of our approach is illustrated with extensive numerical experiments that confirm the efficiency of the proposed pipeline.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_09097
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Detecting malignant dynamics on very few blood sample using signature coefficients
Vaucher, Rémi
Chrétien, Stéphane
Quantitative Methods
Machine Learning
Recent discoveries have suggested that the promising avenue of using circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) levels in blood samples provides reasonable accuracy for cancer monitoring, with extremely low burden on the patient's side. It is known that the presence of ctDNA can result from various mechanisms leading to DNA release from cells, such as apoptosis, necrosis or active secretion. One key idea in recent cancer monitoring studies is that monitoring the dynamics of ctDNA levels might be sufficient for early multi-cancer detection. This interesting idea has been turned into commercial products, e.g. in the company named GRAIL. In the present work, we propose to explore the use of Signature theory for detecting aggressive cancer tumors based on the analysis of blood samples. Our approach combines tools from continuous time Markov modelling for the dynamics of ctDNA levels in the blood, with Signature theory for building efficient testing procedures. Signature theory is a topic of growing interest in the Machine Learning community (see Chevyrev2016 and Fermanian2021), which is now recognised as a powerful feature extraction tool for irregularly sampled signals. The method proposed in the present paper is shown to correctly address the challenging problem of overcoming the inherent data scarsity due to the extremely small number of blood samples per patient. The relevance of our approach is illustrated with extensive numerical experiments that confirm the efficiency of the proposed pipeline.
title Detecting malignant dynamics on very few blood sample using signature coefficients
topic Quantitative Methods
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09097