Lipoma or liposarcoma?

The new test accurately and quickly distinguishes cancer from lipoma

Svetlana Maslova, Hi-tech+

It can be difficult to distinguish a liposarcoma from a benign tumor even under a microscope, and all modern diagnostic tests are either inaccurate or require a lot of time and effort to perform the analysis. Canadian scientists have developed a genetic test that not only distinguishes cancer from a benign neoplasm, but also determines the most common types of liposarcomas with high accuracy.

Many liposarcomas often look like common benign neoplasms – lipomas. The long process of diagnosis and the high probability of an inaccurate result cause great stress in patients, and also often lead to the appointment of improper treatment or, conversely, a delay in the appointment of anti-cancer therapy.

For example, immunohistochemistry (IHC) is inaccurate and difficult to interpret, and the cytogenetic FISH method is quite expensive and requires specific equipment and a lot of labor, scientists explain.

Article by Wang et al. A Rapid and Cost-Effective Gene Expression Assay for the Diagnosis of Well-Differentiated and Differentiated Liposarcomas is published in The Journal of Molecular Diagnosis.

To simplify and improve the quality of diagnostics, scientists began to analyze the most expressed genes in liposarcomas. In total, they isolated 20 such genes from more than 20 thousand cancer images. Then, using machine learning, the algorithm was trained to identify cancer cases from the rest.

The new NanoString test was tested on 100 tissue samples: the sensitivity of the method was 94.1%, and the specificity was 100%. In other words, the test detected cancer in 94% of cases out of 100% and always correctly identified benign neoplasms.

For patients, this means a significant reduction in the number of additional methods of examination, and for some – the complete exclusion of unnecessary surgical intervention, according to the findings of the study.

The results were obtained after 36 hours, while the gold standard FISH method took from one to two weeks.

This means that the new test will be much faster and more accurate to distinguish cancer from benign neoplasms, as well as to determine the most common types of liposarcomas, of which there are more than 60, the authors concluded.

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