FinaleToolkit: Accelerating Cell-Free DNA Fragmentation Analysis with a High-Speed Computational Toolkit

Cell-free DNA (cfDNA) fragmentation pattern represents a promising non-invasive biomarker for disease diagnosis and prognosis. Numerous fragmentation features, such as end motif and window protection score (WPS), have been characterized in cfDNA genomic sequencing. However, the analytical tools developed in these studies are often not released to the liquid biopsy community or are inefficient for genome-wide analysis in large datasets.

To address this gap, we have developed FinaleToolkit, a fast and memory-efficient Python package designed to generate comprehensive fragmentation features from large cfDNA genomic sequencing data. For instance, FinaleToolkit can generate genome-wide WPS features from a ~100X cfDNA whole-genome sequencing (WGS) dataset with over 1 billion fragments in 0.7 hours, offering up to a ~50-fold increase in processing speed compared to original implementations in the same dataset. We have bench-marked FinaleToolkit against original approaches or implementations where possible, confirming its efficacy. Furthermore, FinaleToolkit enabled the genome-wide analysis of fragmentation patterns over arbitrary genomic intervals, significantly boosting the performance for cancer early detection.