A team of scientists at Sheffield Hallam University is now said to have succeeded in detecting breast cancer from fingerprints with an accuracy of 98 per cent. With this, they would have developed a method of detecting breast cancer that is non-invasive.
According to the research team, the technology Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization Mass Spectrometry (MALDI MS) should be able to be applied to enhanced fingerprints for breast cancer detection. Typically, this technology is used to detect drugs, pharmaceuticals and biological molecules in tissue sections.
A group of women with benign, early or metastatic breast cancer were recruited from the Jasmine Breast Unit at Doncaster Royal Infirmary for a study on this. This involved fingerprinting each patient, either at diagnosis or during active treatment. Machine learning was then applied, which is reported to have predicted the correct cancer category with 97.8 per cent accuracy.