Raman spectroscopy combined with principal component analysis and k nearest neighbour analysis for non-invasive detection of colon cancer

This paper attempts to investigate the feasibility of using Raman spectroscopy for the diagnosis of colon cancer. Serum taken from 75 healthy volunteers, 65 colon cancer patients and 60 post-operation colon cancer patients was measured in this experiment. In the Raman spectra of all three groups, the Raman peaks at 750, 1083, 1165, 1321, 1629 and 1779 cm−1 assigned to nucleic acids, amino acids and chromophores were consistently observed. All of these six Raman peaks were observed to have statistically significant differences between groups. For quantitative analysis, the multivariate statistical techniques of principal component analysis (PCA) and k nearest neighbour analysis (KNN) were utilized to develop diagnostic algorithms for classification. In PCA, several peaks in the principal component (PC) loadings spectra were identified as the major contributors to the PC scores. Some of the peaks in the PC loadings spectra were also reported as characteristic peaks for colon tissues, which implies correlation between peaks in PC loadings spectra and those in the original Raman spectra. KNN was also performed on the obtained PCs, and a diagnostic accuracy of 91.0% and a specificity of 92.6% were achieved.