Applications of Infrared Spectroscopy and Microscopy in Diagnosis of Obesity

Abstract

Infrared (IR) spectroscopy is a vibrational spectroscopic technique based on the absorption of infrared radiation by matters that excite vibrations of molecular bonds. It is a powerful method for investigating structural, functional, and compositional changes in biomolecules, cells, and tissues. In recent years, scientific researchers have continued to increase the performance of this technique on clinical cases such as cancers and metabolic disorders. Obesity is one of the main factors that increases the risk of many diseases and contributes to functional disabilities in tissues such as adipose, liver, and muscle. Applications of IR spectroscopic techniques allow identifying molecular changes due to obesity, to understand the molecular mechanism of the disease, to identify specific spectral biomarkers that can be used in diagnosis. In addition, these spectral biomarkers can be used to identify the appropriate drugs and their doses for treatment. In this chapter, applications of IR spectroscopic and microscopic techniques to the characterization and understanding the obesity metabolism will be presented. The discriminatory power of these techniques in diagnosis of obesity will be discussed. In future, these novel approaches will shed light on the internal diagnosis of obesity in clinical application.

Vibrational Spectroscopy Fingerprinting in Medicine: from Molecular to Clinical Practice

“…The IR spectroscopy use should not be ignored in the cell live imaging, since it is also noninvasive and label-free and identifies the chemical structure as Raman spectroscopy [86]. However, we cannot underestimate the strong absorbing signal of water in infrared, which definitely restricts the analysis of samples in aqueous solutions.…”

“…Furthermore, the results of some studies on adipose tissue samples will be brought into question in order to highlight the spectral changes induced by obesity. A typical human adipose tissue IR spectrum includes different functional groups related to biomolecules of the sample, with the fingerprint region established in the 1800 − 750 cm −1 region [86]. The relevant assignments of the peaks found in the spectrum of human adipose tissue are assumed in Table 3 [115,116].…”

A Review on Data Fusion of Multidimensional Medical and Biomedical Data

“…IR spectroscopy uses the absorption of infrared light by molecular bonds to detect vibrations in the sample. The method is effective for investigating changes in the structure, function, and composition of tissues, cells, and biomolecules [ 28 ]. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) is a form of IR spectroscopy for obtaining information about the presence of neoplasic, changes in biopsies, identifying bacteria, and types of arthritis [ 29 ].…”