US Patent 10364468 Systems and methods for analyzing circulating tumor DNA

The invention provides oncogenomic methods for detecting tumors by identifying circulating tumor DNA. A patient-specific reference directed acyclic graph (DAG) represents known human genomic sequences and non-tumor DNA from the patient as well as known tumor-associated mutations. Sequence reads from cell-free plasma DNA from the patient are mapped to the patient-specific genomic reference graph. Any of the known tumor-associated mutations found in the reads and any de novo mutations found in the reads are reported as the patient's tumor mutation burden.