In the new precision oncology era, clinicians are using information from complex laboratory and imaging results to define the genetic and microscopic-molecular features that can assign a fingerprint of an individual patient’s cancer. This type of personalized tumor characterization can then more effectively and safely help to inform and improved cancer diagnosis and management.
These computational methods are also being applied to patient’s blood samples to analyse features of circulating free tumor cell DNA, if present… although such testing is still in preliminary stages, these methods have been able to detect early-stage cancers before they are symptomatic or visualized.
See this article from researchers in Southern California for more information on the clinical applications of circulating tumor DNA: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6136923/