Circulating Immune Complexes in Malignant Melanoma: Serial Studies in 130 Patients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We evaluated the ability of repeated measurements of circulating immune complexes (CIC) to predict for tumor recurrence in 130 patients with malignant melanoma. Twenty-two patients had level 2, 45 had level 3, and 51 had level 4/5, stage I disease in remission at the start of monitoring, while 12 had stage II disease. The polyethylene glycol precipitation assay was used for serial studies, based on an initial comparative evaluation with the Clq-binding and Raji assays. The study averaged 22 +/- 11 months (6-43 months) and an average of 22 +/- 5.3 assays were performed per patient (range 3-36), with a follow-up of 4 years. CIC were present in sera in recurrent, irregular 'bursts' of activity. Serial measurements doubled the incidence of CIC compared to single determinations. Only 23% of these bursts of activity were clearly related temporarily to documented recurrences, while 34% occurred with treatment events such as surgery or immunotherapy, and 42% occurred without correlation to either recurrence or treatment. CIC activity was greater and more closely related to recurrence in high-risk stage I (level 4,5) and stage II patients. Whether analyzed as positive sera or as bursts of elevated CIC activity, CIC assays predicted for recurrence at the 5% significance level. The assay was highly sensitive (97%), but with poor specificity (21%) with many false positives (79%). The assay was helpful at ruling out recurrences (95%), but poor at ruling them in (29%). The advantage was seen only in high-risk stage I and II patients, and there was no advantage to serial assays over random single determinations. Although generally, CIC in the sera of melanoma patients were found to predict for recurrence, the use of serial CIC measures monitoring of individual patients cannot be recommended.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".