RESEARCH ARTICLE
Diagnosing breast cancer by using Raman spectroscopy
Abigail S. Haka, Karen E. Shafer-Peltier, Maryann Fitzmaurice, Joseph Crowe, Ramachandra R. Dasari, and Michael S. Feld
This is one of the very first examples of the use of Raman Spectroscopy to diagnose benign and malignant lesions in human breast tissue. This study pioneered the application of Raman Spectroscopy for the diagnosis of surgical margins, demonstrating Raman spectroscopy had the potential to be applied in vivo to accurately classify breast lesions.
The authors collected 130 Raman spectra from ex vivo samples of the breast tissue of 58 patients. They also fitted the data using a linear combination model in which nine basis spectra represent the morphologic and chemical features of breast tissue. The resulting fit coefficients provide insight into the chemical/morphological makeup of the tissue and are used to develop diagnostic algorithms. The fit coefficients for fat and collagen are the key parameters in the resulting diagnostic algorithm, which classifies samples according to their specific pathological diagnoses, attaining 94% sensitivity and 96% specificity for distinguishing cancerous tissues from normal and benign tissues.