Brain tumour differentiation: rapid stratified serum diagnostics via attenuated total reflection Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy

Abstract

The ability to diagnose cancer rapidly with high sensitivity and specificity is essential to exploit advances in new treatments to lead significant reductions in mortality and morbidity. Current cancer diagnostic tests observing tissue architecture and specific protein expression for specific cancers suffer from inter-observer variability, poor detection rates and occur when the patient is symptomatic. A new method for the detection of cancer using 1 μl of human serum, attenuated total reflection—Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and pattern recognition algorithms is reported using a 433 patient dataset (3897 spectra). To the best of our knowledge, we present the largest study on serum mid-infrared spectroscopy for cancer research. We achieve optimum sensitivities and specificities using a Radial Basis Function Support Vector Machine of between 80.0 and 100 % for all strata and identify the major spectral features, hence biochemical components, responsible for the discrimination within each stratum. We assess feature fed-SVM analysis for our cancer versus non-cancer model and achieve 91.5 and 83.0 % sensitivity and specificity respectively. We demonstrate the use of infrared light to provide a spectral signature from human serum to detect, for the first time, cancer versus non-cancer, metastatic cancer versus organ confined, brain cancer severity and the organ of origin of metastatic disease from the same sample enabling stratified diagnostics depending upon the clinical question asked.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11060-016-2060-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Ultra-filtration of human serum for improved quantitative analysis of low molecular weight biomarkers using ATR-IR spectroscopy

“…The number of studies related to serum proteomics, peptidomics or metabololics has literary exploded in the literature, complex analytical techniques such as chromatography and/or mass spectroscopy being the reference tools 10,11 . Quite naturally, vibrational spectroscopy, which has been widely employed in biomedical analysis, from tissue sections 12,13 to single cells 14,15 with a well demonstrated potential for diagnosis 16,17 , has the capability to become the next generation gold standard tool for serum based patient screening [18][19][20] . The advent of imaging technologies coupled to the rapid data collection offered by FTIR systems has contributed considerably to the attraction of infrared absorption spectroscopy for biomedical applications [21][22][23] .…”

Elemental and molecular profiling of licit, illicit, and niche tobacco

“…Groups of niche, cigarette and hand rolled tobacco data were compared to licit cigarettes as these are more likely to have higher levels of consistency between samples due to being from a controlled cultivation plant source. Vector normalization was applied to all the grouped raw data using the Spectroscopy Toolbox [21]. Variable ranking was applied using the Spectroscopy Toolbox allowing for the retention of the top 30% highest discriminatory wavenumbers.…”

“…Variable ranking was applied using the Spectroscopy Toolbox allowing for the retention of the top 30% highest discriminatory wavenumbers. From this 30%, the top 30 wavenumbers listed were used to determine functional groups with the most significant differences between the spectra, identifying a spectral fingerprint for each type of tobacco [21]. Principle component analysis (PCA) using a covariance matrix was conducted after the following data pre-treatment in Mathematica 10 (Wolfram Research, USA); FTIR data was rescaled between 0-1 and the second derivative of the Savitzky-Golay 2 nd order polynomial curve 3 point window [22].…”

Aluminium foil as an alternative substrate for the spectroscopic interrogation of endometrial cancer

“…The key factor that renders this analytical method a perfect diagnostic tool, in comparison to other molecular methods, is its non‐destructive, cost‐effective and label‐free nature. Over the years, infrared (IR) and Raman spectroscopic techniques have been employed to study a number of different diseases, such as cancer, neurological diseases, prenatal disorders and many others . Within the field of disease investigation, spectroscopy has the potential to diagnose and monitor a disease, while at the same time assessment of surgical margins of a tumour or determination of the subtype of a disease is also feasible.…”

“…Most spectroscopic studies so far, with only a few exceptions , have included a limited number of subjects which appears to be an important limitation for the establishment of the method and its migration into clinics . Standardization and validation of methods should be performed in large clinical trials for more robust and trustworthy results.…”