Malignant Tumor With Metastasis

Early detection and timely intervention of distant metastasis are essential for improving the prognosis of patients with malignant tumors. However, current clinical methods have notable limitations. Conventional imaging can only detect macroscopic metastatic lesions, failing to seize the optimal intervention window before metastasis occurs or during the micrometastasis stage. Previous research has adopted artificial intelligence to break the constraints of traditional imaging and realized subclinical early warning of distant metastasis based on retrospective data. On this basis, the present study aims to systematically validate the predictive performance and generalizability of the model in real-world clinical settings via a prospective cohort. This study intends to establish an organ-specific, non-invasive and cost-effective pan-cancer tool for early warning of distant metastasis. It can gain critical time for clinical intervention, help reduce the incidence of distant metastasis and ultimately optimize patient prognosis.

This study will enroll patients with metastatic malignancies. Tumor samples (fresh or formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissue specimens) will undergo RNA extraction and next-generation sequencing (RNA-seq). Once the raw data is obtained, the system will analyze the transcriptomic feature values (cancer-specific RNA transcripts and tissue-specific RNA transcripts) expressed in the tumor tissue samples to further predict tissue origin using a machine learning model. The output includes probabilities and confidence intervals for tissue origin.