Detection of cancer by optical analysis of body fluids--a single blind study

This paper pertains to a new technique based on fluorescence emission spectra (FES), and stokes shift spectra (SSS) of blood plasma, acetone extract of cellular fraction, and urine. These samples were collected from 60 cancer patients of different etiology and 60 age adjusted controls for a single blind study. A set of ratio parameters were obtained from the above spectra (FES and SSS of above three sets of samples), based on the relative intensity of biofluorophores like tryptophan, tyrosine, flavin etc. It was found that these biofluorophores go out of proportion for malignancy of any etiolology. The study was done in two phases: calibration and validation. Based on a certain set of ratios obtained by simple statistical analysis, in the calibration phase, the blinded samples of validation phase were spectrally analysed and classified as normal or malignant. The scoring done by independent oncologists (who were not involved in any part of this new technique) yielded an overall sensitivity of 87%, and specificity of 83%. The result indicate that new optical spectroscopic techniques could be a simple, non-invasive protocol for detection of cancers, particularly in symptomatic cases; or for monitoring the post treated cases of cancer.