Innovative Approaches to Head and Neck Cancer Diagnosis

Diagnosis, positioned between disease prevention and treatment, is essential for head and neck cancer management. Delays in diagnosis contribute to disease upstaging, leading to more complex treatment with poorer survival and functional outcomes. This article focuses on current and future innovative diagnostic approaches, which vary in maturity and implementation, to promote early diagnosis. These include symptom-based triaging, telemedicine, diagnostic hubs, machine learning, and circulating tumor markers. COVID-19 brought about new diagnostic pathways, many of which remained in place, generating encouraging evidence of pathway efficiency. However, nuanced diagnostic tools for early cancer detection remain far from implementation in a real-world setting.