Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy + support vector machine: a new noninvasive method for prostate cancer screening?

Prostate cancer is one of the most common malignancies of the older males worldwide. Early diagnosis and treatment are important to improve the survival of patients. Recently, we developed a new method for prostate cancer screening: by measuring the serum surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy of prostate cancer patients and normal subjects, combining with classification algorithms of support vector machines, the measured surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy spectra are successfully classified with accuracy of 98.1%. Although the practical application faces several difficulties, we believe that this label-free serum surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy analysis technique combined with support vector machine diagnostic algorithms will become a powerful tool for noninvasive prostate cancer screening in the future.