Assessment of Compressive Raman versus Hyperspectral Raman for Microcalcification Chemical Imaging

We experimentally implement a compressive Raman technology (CRT) that incorporates chemometric analysis directly into the spectrometer hardware by means of a digital micromirror device (DMD). The DMD is a programmable optical filter on which optimized binary filters are displayed. The latter are generated with an algorithm based on the Cramer-Rao lower bound. We compared the developed CRT microspectrometer with two conventional state-of-the-art Raman hyperspectral imaging systems on samples mimicking microcalcifications relevant for breast cancer diagnosis. The CRT limit of detection significantly improves, when compared to the CCD based system, and CRT ultimately allows 100× and 10× faster acquisition speeds than the CCD- and EMCCD-based systems, respectively.