Near-infrared spectroscopy as a diagnostic tool for distinguishing between normal and malignant colorectal tissues

Cancer diagnosis is one of the most important tasks of biomedical research and has become the main objective of medical investigations. The present paper proposed an analytical strategy for distinguishing between normal and malignant colorectal tissues by combining the use of near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy with chemometrics. The successive projection algorithm-linear discriminant analysis (SPA-LDA) was used to seek a reduced subset of variables/wavenumbers and build a diagnostic model of LDA. For comparison, the partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) based on full-spectrum classification was also used as the reference. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used for a preliminary analysis. A total of 186 spectra from 20 patients with partial colorectal resection were collected and divided into three subsets for training, optimizing, and testing the model. The results showed that, compared to PLS-DA, SPA-LDA provided more parsimonious model using only three wavenumbers/variables (4065, 4173, and 5758 cm(-1)) to achieve the sensitivity of 84.6%, 92.3%, and 92.3% for the training, validation, and test sets, respectively, and the specificity of 100% for each subset. It indicated that the combination of NIR spectroscopy and SPA-LDA algorithm can serve as a potential tool for distinguishing between normal and malignant colorectal tissues.