Comparison of premalignant cases with high-risk carriers. PBMC genomic DNA from 6 premalignant cases (1 year prior to diagnosis with ATL), 55 high-risk individuals, and 12 low-risk controls was deep sequenced using the ATL-mut-scan probes (see supplemental Table 5). Variants were identified using the Shearwater ML algorithm by pairwise comparison with the 2 low-risk controls. (A) Number of variants detected per sample. (B) Mean frequency of variant alleles in PBMCs (per diploid genome). Statistics: Mann-Whitney, 2-tailed, 95% confidence interval. (C) ROC curve of the number of mutations detected and the frequency of mutations in the blood. AUC, area under the curve; ROC, receiver operator characteristic curve.