AN AI-POWERED test could detect three major types of cancer using just a drop of dried blood, a study suggests.
It could help reduce undiagnosed cases in less developed countries around the world by up to 55 per cent, they said.
Lead author Ruimin Wang, of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said: “Over a billion people across the world experience a high rate of missed disease diagnosis.
“This highlights the need for diagnostic tools showing increased accuracy and affordability.
“Our approach allows diagnosis of multiple cancers within minutes at affordable cost.”
Bowel cancer is now the third most common cancer in Britain, with 41,596 Brits diagnosed in 2021.
It is the UK’s second deadliest cancer, claiming 16,000 lives each year.
There are around 6,500 new stomach cancer cases annually in the country, while 10,500 people are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Survival rates of all three are much higher if the cancer is spotted earlier, with researchers constantly looking to improve ways of testing for the disease.
Most current blood tests for the diseases use liquid blood to spot markers of the cancer, and are not powerful enough to diagnose any of them individually.
Dr Chaoyuan Kuang, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who was not involved in the research, said using dried blood could be a gamechanger.
He said dried blood can be “collected, stored and transported at much lower cost and with much simpler equipment”.
He told Live Science: “This could help democratise the availability of cancer early detection testing across the world.”
he tool uses artificial intelligence to analyse biomarkers in the blood, and was tested in proof-of-concept, preliminary experiments.
Source: THE Sun
