Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy for differentiation between benign and malignant thyroid tissues

Abstract

The aim of this study was to evaluate the potential of applying silver nano-particle based surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) to discriminate different types of human thyroid tissues. SERS measurements were performed on three groups of tissue samples including thyroid cancers (n = 32), nodular goiters (n = 20) and normal thyroid tissues (n = 25). Tentative assignments of the measured tissue SERS spectra suggest interesting cancer specific biomolecular differences. The principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminate analysis (LDA) together with the leave-one-out, cross-validated technique yielded diagnostic sensitivities of 92%, 75% and 87.5%; and specificities of 82.6%, 89.4% and 84.4%, respectively, for differentiation among normal, nodular and malignant thyroid tissue samples. This work demonstrates that tissue SERS spectroscopy associated with multivariate analysis diagnostic algorithms has great potential for detection of thyroid cancer at the molecular level.

Label‐Free Molecular Imaging of Biological Cells and Tissues by Linear and Nonlinear Raman Spectroscopic Approaches

“…The intracellular detection of H 2 S, an important gasotransmitter, has also been studied. [218] In addition, the differentiation between benign and malignant thyroid tissue [219] as well as normal and cancerous esophageal tissue [220] was achieved with the same SERS approach. Under stimulation of S-adenosylmethionine,t he SERS-based detection of endogenous H 2 Swas demonstrated in living cells.F inally,t he detection of drugs and their metabolic products opens the way towards understanding the therapeutic molecular mechanisms on the cellular level.…”

“…Furthermore,alabel-free SERS approach was employed for the investigation of tissue sections.A gNPs were dropped and dried on rat pancreatic tissue,a nd the vibrational modes of the SERS spectra were assigned to DNA, RNA, proteins,and lipids. [218] In addition, the differentiation between benign and malignant thyroid tissue [219] as well as normal and cancerous esophageal tissue [220] was achieved with the same SERS approach. Silica-coated AgNPs were used to detect microcalcifications in benign and premalignant breast tissue samples.…”

Characterization and Visualization of Vesicles in the Endo-Lysosomal Pathway with Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy and Chemometrics

“…In the former, a molecule is functionalized as a self-assembled monolayer on the nanoparticle and the SERS detection of its characteristic spectrum serves to visualize the location of the nanoparticle(s) inside the cell or tissue. 1,2 This SERS reporter approach has been used in a variety of applications including detection of pathologic cells and tissues such as in cancer [4][5][6] or cancer markers in biofluids such as blood. 7,8 The reporters can also serve as pH sensors by an appropriate choice of the functionalized molecule with an exchangeable H + .…”

Infrared and confocal Raman spectroscopy to differentiate changes in the protein secondary structure in normal and abnormal thyroid tissues

“…Recent works concerning Raman spectroscopy applied to the analysis of thyroid tissues demonstrate that Raman spectroscopy has great potential as an inexpensive method for detection of thyroid cancer at the molecular level and for the diagnosis of thyroid pathologies …”