Scientists study methods of enhancing lung cancer detection accuracy

Scientists have examined ways to improve the accuracy of lung cancer detection.

The research was published in online journal Proteome Science and looked at methods to enhance the accuracy of Surface-Enhanced Laser Desorption/Ionization Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry (SELDI-TOF-MS).

SELDI is regularly used as a lung cancer biomarker, the scientists explained; however, they highlighted that concomitant inflammation can affect the results.

It is this aspect that the team attempted to improve the accuracy of, testing a two-stage analysis process.

Patients with lung cancer, inflammatory disease and healthy subjects were tested in the study in order to ascertain how effective the tests were.

"Inflammatory disease can severely interfere with the detection accuracy of SELDI profiles for lung cancer. Using a two-stage training process will improve the specificity and accuracy of detecting lung cancer," concluded the researchers.

Publishing research on both structural and functional proteomics, Proteome Science is an online journal that releases papers after peer review.