Introducing Discrete Frequency Infrared Technology for High-Throughput Biofluid Screening

Abstract

Accurate early diagnosis is critical to patient survival, management and quality of life. Biofluids are key to early diagnosis due to their ease of collection and intimate involvement in human function. Large-scale mid-IR imaging of dried fluid deposits offers a high-throughput molecular analysis paradigm for the biomedical laboratory. The exciting advent of tuneable quantum cascade lasers allows for the collection of discrete frequency infrared data enabling clinically relevant timescales. By scanning targeted frequencies spectral quality, reproducibility and diagnostic potential can be maintained while significantly reducing acquisition time and processing requirements, sampling 16 serum spots with 0.6, 5.1 and 15% relative standard deviation (RSD) for 199, 14 and 9 discrete frequencies respectively. We use this reproducible methodology to show proof of concept rapid diagnostics; 40 unique dried liquid biopsies from brain, breast, lung and skin cancer patients were classified in 2.4 cumulative seconds against 10 non-cancer controls with accuracies of up to 90%.

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] .…”

Characterization of colorectal mucus using infrared spectroscopy: a potential target for bowel cancer screening and diagnosis

“…Using this approach, biological materials mostly comprising of tissue biopsies and cells have been tested, primarily with the aim to integrate IR spectroscopy into routine clinical diagnosis process [9][10][11][12][13][14]. Bio-fluids such as serum and sputum which are easy-to-obtain and less invasive compared with tissue biopsy procedures have also been tested using this approach for cancer diagnosis [15][16][17]. However, the complexity and the unknown nature of biomolecular constituents in bio-fluids pose significant challenges in identifying specific markers that could be used in cancer diagnosis.…”

Recent advancements of EC-QCL based mid-IR transmission spectroscopy of proteins and application to analysis of bovine milk1

“…Recently, an IR microscope equipped with EC-QCLs became commercially available (Spero, Daylight Solutions), which refuelled the interest in IR spectroscopy for histopathology. It has been successfully applied for protein analysis in human colons [7], breast tissue microarrays [6], and dried human serum [28].…”