Water as a probe for serum-based diagnosis by temperature- dependent near-infrared spectroscopy

Diagnosis based on the compositional variation of biological liquids such as serum has drawn much attention. For exploring the potential diagnostic information from serum samples, temperature-dependent near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy was developed to obtain the spectral change of water reflecting the interactions in serum solution, and chemometric methods were employed to mine the information from the temperature-dependent NIR spectra. The spectra of 68 healthy controls, 42 patients with the type II diabetes and 16 patients with coronary heart disease were measured and analyzed by chemometric calculations. Continuous wavelet transform (CWT) was used to enhance the resolution of the spectra. From the processed spectra, the information of non-hydrogen-bonded (NHB), weakly hydrogen-bonded (WHB) and strongly hydrogen-bonded (SHB) water species was observed. For explaining the variation of the spectra with temperature, two-dimensional (2D) correlation analysis was adopted. A clear difference in SHB/NHB ratio in the synchronous maps was found between the spectra of the patients and the controls. 86.8% of the controls and 98.3% of the patients can be correctly identified. Furthermore, combining the maps of the synchronous and asynchronous analysis, the correlation between SHB and WHB water species was discovered to have an ability to discriminate the patients of diabetes and heart disease with an accuracy of 83.7% and 75.0%, respectively. Therefore, water may be a probe for providing diagnostic information by temperature-dependent NIR spectroscopy.