Loading
Early detection and screening means finding cancer before it causes symptoms, when it is most curable.
This section groups the ways of finding cancer before it causes symptoms, when it is most curable: established population screening with mammography, colonoscopy, low-dose CT, HPV testing and PSA, plus blood-based multi-cancer early detection and risk-adapted AI screening that aim to reach cancers with no screening test today. Technologies filed here include low-dose CT lung screening, colorectal cancer screening, HPV DNA testing and self-sampling, mammography and tomosynthesis, whole-body MRI, MCED and DNA methylation profiling. It also covers surveillance of high-risk groups, such as pancreatic surveillance and HCC surveillance in cirrhosis, dermoscopy and AI skin analysis, and the procedures that follow a positive screen, including endoscopic resection and colposcopy.
Real-time software that highlights polyps on the colonoscopy screen, helping doctors find more of the growths that could become bowel cancer.
Software that reads screening mammograms alongside or before radiologists, catching more cancers and cutting the reading workload in large trials.
A girl who had radiotherapy to the chest carries a risk of breast cancer by age 50 of about 30 per cent. It is not only about dose: a low dose to the whole lung gave a higher standardised incidence than a high dose to a smaller field, because volume matters. Surveillance is recommended from early adulthood, decades before ordinary screening starts.
Breast MRI is the most sensitive breast scan, done lying face down with the breasts in a special coil. Abbreviated protocols cut the scan from half an hour to a few minutes, which makes MRI screening of women with dense breasts or high risk affordable.
Smelling cancer: measuring the trace chemicals a tumour puts into exhaled breath.
A camera the size of a large vitamin pill that the patient swallows; it photographs the whole small intestine, which ordinary endoscopes cannot reach, and newer versions look at the colon as an alternative to colonoscopy for people who cannot or will not have one.
Blood tests that read chemical marks on fragments of DNA shed by tumours; the marks tell cancer DNA from normal DNA and hint at where the cancer is.
Fragmentomics reads the sizes and positions of DNA fragments in blood, not the mutations. Cancer cells die messily and leave a recognisable fragmentation pattern.
Fishing whole cancer cells out of a blood sample to count them or study them; the count is prognostic in breast, prostate and colorectal cancer.
Finding and removing polyps before they become cancer. Colonoscopy prevents cancer; stool and blood tests catch it early and get more people screened.
The magnifying camera a gynaecologist uses to examine the cervix after an abnormal smear or HPV test, and the new portable and smartphone versions with software that scores the picture, built for clinics with no specialist in reach.
Looking at the cervix with a magnifier after a positive screen, then removing the abnormal patch with an electric wire loop in a clinic visit.
Devices that look beneath the skin surface without cutting: one scans cells with a laser at microscope resolution, another builds a cross-section with infrared light. Both help decide whether a suspicious mole or patch needs a biopsy, and which edge to cut to.
A mammogram taken after an iodine contrast injection, at two X-ray energies, so that a tumour's blood supply shows up as a bright spot. It gives much of what breast MRI gives on a machine most breast units already own.
Magnified skin imaging and whole-body photo mapping, increasingly read by algorithms, to find melanoma early and avoid unnecessary biopsies.
Reading chemical tags on DNA that reveal a cell's identity, used to classify brain tumours and to detect cancer in blood.
Endoscopic resection lifts an early cancer of the oesophagus or stomach with an injection and cuts it out from inside with a snare or electrosurgical knife, keeping the organ intact. It cures cancers confined to the mucosa (T1a) and gives a definitive depth reading; deeper invasion or lymph node spread still needs surgery.
In Korea and Japan, where stomach cancer is common, adults have a camera examination of the stomach every two years, so most cancers are found early enough to remove through the endoscope.
People with cirrhosis or chronic hepatitis B get a liver ultrasound and a blood test every six months so cancer is caught while it is still curable.
Yearly MRI or endoscopic ultrasound for people with inherited risk, which catches pancreatic cancers while they are still operable.
Young people often say their cancer took a long time to diagnose, and the research agrees that time to diagnosis varies widely by tumour type and age. What the research does not support is a single number: a systematic review found the studies used different definitions and skewed data that could not be combined, so no meta-analysis was possible.
A swab tested for the virus that causes cervical cancer, more accurate than the Pap smear and doable at home.
A yearly low-radiation CT scan for current and former heavy smokers that finds lung cancer early enough to cure it.
Low-dose breast X-ray used for screening. Newer 3D versions find more cancers with fewer false alarms.
Reads a mammogram to estimate five-year breast cancer risk, consistently across races and devices.
A single blood test intended to screen for dozens of cancers at once, including ones with no screening today.
A home stool test that reads RNA from cells shed by the bowel lining together with a haemoglobin test; approved in the United States in 2024 as an alternative to stool DNA tests for average-risk screening from age 45.
England's lung screening programme: people aged 55 to 74 who have ever smoked are invited for a risk assessment and, if high risk, a low-dose CT scan, often in a mobile unit in a supermarket car park.
A trained health worker looking inside the mouth with a light can find mouth cancer early; in India this cut deaths by a third among people who use tobacco or alcohol.
A score built from hundreds of common gene variants that says whether your inherited risk of a cancer is higher or lower than average, now being tested as a way to decide who is screened and how often.
Whether men should be screened for prostate cancer is still debated; the modern approach uses a PSA blood test followed by an MRI scan, which finds the cancers that matter while leaving harmless ones alone.
The largest late risk a childhood cancer survivor carries. Thirty years after diagnosis, 20.5 per cent of survivors treated in the 1970s and early 1980s had developed a subsequent neoplasm. The fifteen-year risk of a second malignancy has since fallen from 2.1 to 1.3 per cent across treatment decades, and the fall tracks the radiotherapy taken out.
Checking the whole skin for suspicious moles finds melanomas earlier, but no trial has yet shown that screening everyone saves lives, so most countries target people at high risk.
Predicts a person's six-year lung cancer risk from one low-dose CT, even when no nodule is visible.
Scanners sensitive enough to image the whole body in seconds at a fraction of the radiation dose, which raises the question of whether healthy people should be scanned at all.
A nurse paints the cervix with household-strength vinegar and looks with a torch: precancer turns white within a minute and can be frozen or heat-treated at the same visit, which is how cervical cancer deaths were cut by a third in Indian villages without a laboratory.
Whole-body MRI is an MRI of the entire body without radiation, used to find spread in myeloma and to screen people with high inherited cancer risk.
For someone offered the test, these are the numbers that describe what a result means in an NHS population: about 1 in 100 tests came back positive each year, between 46 and 58 in 100 positives were cancer, and a negative result left about 1 in 100 with an undetected cancer within the year. The test found between a quarter and a third of all cancers diagnosed in a screening round, and about half to two thirds of the 12 cancer types it was designed to find. Whether finding them this way reduces late-stage diagnoses is the primary question, and this paper says only that the answer was no; the primary-endpoint paper had not appeared on Europe PMC by 23 September 2026.
The numbers behind the argument that the screening programme is working for the people it covers and failing everyone below its start age; the stage shift going into reverse is the most uncomfortable figure on this roadmap.
It reframes air quality as cancer policy rather than respiratory policy, and it explains the shape of lung cancer in never-smokers: the mutations are common and mostly silent, and what differs is whether something inflames the tissue enough to let one of them grow.
AI can take over one reader's work in double-reading screening programmes while finding more cancers. Whether the extra cancers found are ones that would have harmed women, and whether interval cancers fall, is the question the trial's primary endpoint will answer.
A multi-cancer blood test can be run in ordinary clinics, and most positive results can be resolved with imaging. But six in ten positives are false alarms that take months to resolve, and the test misses most cancers. Whether it reduces late-stage cancer or deaths is unknown; that requires randomised trials.
NHS-Galleri is the trial that will decide whether a blood test for many cancers at once should be offered by a health system. Its endpoint is a reduction in late-stage cancer rather than deaths, so even a positive result leaves the mortality question to be settled by longer follow-up.
A colonoscopy probably does reduce bowel cancer risk for the person who has it, but a programme that offers colonoscopy achieves much less if most people decline. Programmes based on stool tests with high uptake may deliver as much population benefit at lower cost and risk.
Lung cancer in never-smokers is not smokers' lung cancer with the smoking removed; it is a different set of diseases with a different clock. The slow-growing piano subtype in particular is the argument that a screening test aimed at never-smokers would need to look for something other than what low-dose computed tomography was built to find.
Open-source software, hardware and data projects catalogued by a third party, the Open Medical Registry, that bear on this front. Listing is not endorsement; check each project's own licence and validation before clinical use.
Deep Neural Networks Improve Radiologists' Performance in Breast Cancer Screening
An interpretable classifier for high-resolution breast cancer screening images utilizing weakly supervised localization
Human Papillomavirus (HPV) testing on self-collected samples allows for improved coverage rates of cervical cancer (CC) screening programs.
Deep learning on dermatoscopic images, with a browser demo that lets you try the task against the model.
Meta-repository of screening mammography classifiers
Preprocessing 3D medical images and image archives, geared towards prostate cancer detection in MRI.
Silicone Breast Phantoms for use with Digital Imaging Elasto-Tomography Breast Cancer Screening
Home for the unified VICTRE pipeline for in silico breast imaging.
From the Open Medical Registry (openmedical.sh), an MIT-licensed catalogue of open-source medicine. Blurbs are one line from each registry record; every project keeps its own licence.