Early Cancer Detection in Blood Vessels Using Mobile Nanosensors

In this paper, we propose using mobile nanosensors (MNSs) for early stage anomaly detection. For concreteness, we focus on the detection of cancer cells located in a particular region of a blood vessel. These cancer cells produce and emit special molecules, so-called biomarkers, which are symptomatic for the presence of anomaly, into the cardiovascular system. Detection of cancer biomarkers with conventional blood tests is difficult in the early stages of a cancer due to the very low concentration of the biomarkers in the samples taken. However, close to the cancer cells, the concentration of the cancer biomarkers is high. Hence, detection is possible if a sensor with the ability to detect these biomarkers is placed in the vicinity of the cancer cells. Therefore, in this paper, we study the use of MNSs that are injected at a suitable injection site and can move through the blood vessels of the cardiovascular system, which potentially contain cancer cells. These MNSs can be activated by the biomarkers close to the cancer cells, where the biomarker concentration is sufficiently high. Eventually, the MNSs are collected by a fusion center (FC), where their activation levels are read and exploited to declare the presence of anomaly. We analytically derive the biomarker concentration in a network of interconnected blood vessels as well as the probability mass function of the MNSs’ activation levels and validate the obtained results via particle-based simulations. Then, we derive the optimal decision rule for the FC regarding the presence of anomaly assuming that the entire network is known at the FC. Finally, for the FC, we propose a simple sum detector that does not require knowledge of the network topology. Our simulations reveal that while the optimal detector achieves a higher performance than the sum detector, both proposed detectors significantly outperform a benchmark scheme that uses fixed nanosensors at the FC.