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Liquid biopsy in gastrointestinal oncology: clinical applications and translational integration of ctDNA, CTCs, and sEVs

Oncol Rev. 2025 Oct 20;19:1702932. doi: 10.3389/or.2025.1702932. eCollection 2025.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Liquid biopsy offers a minimally invasive tool to detect actionable mutations, monitor minimal residual disease (MRD), and guide therapy in gastrointestinal (GI) cancers. We critically review the clinical utility of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), circulating tumor cells (CTCs), and small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) across GI malignancies and propose a framework for their integration into clinical practice.

METHODS: We synthesized evidence from over 200 studies, including prospective trials and translational research, to assess diagnostic accuracy, prognostic value, and clinical actionability of each biomarker type in esophageal, gastric, colorectal, pancreatic, hepatocellular, and biliary cancers.

RESULTS: ctDNA has shown strong potential for MRD detection and treatment monitoring, particularly in colorectal and pancreatic cancer. CTCs offer insights into metastatic risk and therapeutic resistance, while sEVs provide molecular cargo relevant to immunomodulation and disease progression. Emerging microfluidics and AI-driven multi-omics approaches may overcome current limitations.

CONCLUSION: The integration of liquid biopsy technologies into GI oncology holds promise for early detection and precision therapy. We propose a five-phase clinical roadmap and outine the key research gaps that need to be addressed before widespread implementation in routine care.

PMID:41190015 | PMC:PMC12580207 | DOI:10.3389/or.2025.1702932

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Combining International Standards to Develop Clinical Decision Support for Parent Smoking Cessation in Pediatrics

Smoking has severe health consequences, and secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure among children increases the risk of sudden infant death syndrome, chronic respiratory diseases, such as asthma, and lung cancer in adulthood. For many parents, pediatricians are the primary source of interaction with the healthcare system. Nevertheless, in pediatric settings, appropriate tobacco treatments are rarely, if ever, provided to parents who smoke. To best address tobacco use among parents, it is ideal to develop scalable solutions that are coordinated across health systems, community partners, and national services within pediatric settings. We describe our experience developing and implementing a parent tobacco treatment platform (PTTP) within a pediatric institution that leverages multiple international standards to support interoperability, with the overarching goal of providing a model for how such work can be approached. The clinical decision support (CDS) system includes clinician- and patient-facing components, connects parents to three different treatment options (nicotine replacement therapy, text-based counseling, and telephonic counseling), and incorporates three international standards (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources [FHIR], SMART on FHIR, and CDS Hooks). FHIR is used across all components. SMART on FHIR is limited to the clinician-facing tool, and CDS Hooks is used in the patient-facing portion. While healthcare interoperability standards supported a significant portion of the overall system, non-standard technologies and enhancements of existing standards were also required. Further, no connections with community partners could use existing interoperability standards. Over one year, the CDS was used in 194,946 visits, identified 7,847 parents who smoke, and connected 2,954 parents to 6,320 distinct treatment services, a significant improvement compared to prior efforts. Our project demonstrates that building CDS systems using international standards, such as SMART on FHIR, FHIR, and CDS Hooks, is possible, but challenges remain. Limits in the CDS Hooks standard to support common workflows and a lack of communication standards used by 3rd parties outside the healthcare system represent areas for future work. To support these requirements, additional EHR-specific records and communication mechanisms were required.
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A multimodal whole-slide foundation model for pathology

Nature Medicine, Published online: 05 November 2025; doi:10.1038/s41591-025-03982-3

Pretrained using 335,645 whole-slide images, a foundation model is developed to provide representations for slide- and patient-level tasks. It is capable of performing clinical tasks and generating reports even in data-scarce scenarios, such as rare cancer diagnosis and survival prediction, without requiring further fine-tuning.
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Fair human-centric image dataset for ethical AI benchmarking

Nature, Published online: 05 November 2025; doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09716-2

The Fair Human-Centric Image Benchmark (FHIBE, pronounced ‘Feebee’)—an image dataset that implements best practices for consent, privacy, compensation, safety, diversity and utility—can be used responsibly as a fairness evaluation dataset for many human-centric computer vision applications.
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