Evaluation of serum-based cancer biomarkers: a brief review from a clinical and computational viewpoint

Biomarkers are vital to detect diseases in various clinical stages. A variety of cancer serum biomarkers are already known, while for more accurate cancer-type detection, there required more rigorous evaluation manners, especially computational evaluation measures, for biomarkers. In this review, we first show three typical pitfalls in finding biomarkers and their examples, after briefly presenting standard five clinical biomarker screening phases by National Cancer Institute. We then introduce current computational biomarker evaluation measures, including current, standard methods with their intrinsic features. We further show an up-to-date list of existing cancer serum biomarkers, pointing out several issues, being caused by the limitations of current biomarker evaluation approaches. Finally we discuss the current attempts to develop new, statistically robust, computational serum-based biomarker measures in terms of specificity to each of various cancer types.