A computational model for the cancer field effect

The Cancer Field Effect describes an area of pre-cancerous cells that results from continued exposure to carcinogens. Cells in the cancer field can easily develop into cancer. Removal of the main tumor mass might leave the cancer field behind, increasing risk of recurrence.

The model we propose for the cancer field effect is a hybrid cellular automaton (CA), which includes a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to compute the effects of the carcinogens on the gene expression of the genes related to cancer development. We use carcinogen interactions that are typically associated with smoking and alcohol consumption and their effect on cancer fields of the tongue.

Using simulations we support the understanding that tobacco smoking is a potent carcinogen, which can be reinforced by alcohol consumption. The effect of alcohol alone is significantly less than the effect of tobacco. We further observe that pairing tumor excision with field removal delays recurrence compared to tumor excision alone. We track cell lineages and find that, in most cases, a polyclonal field develops, where the number of distinct cell lineages decreases over time as some lineages become dominant over others. Finally, we find tumor masses rarely form via monoclonal origin.