Breast cancer detection by ATR-FTIR spectroscopy of blood serum and multivariate data-analysis

Detection of breast cancer has particular importance for the diagnosis of cancer diseases. This is the most common type of cancer among women. Breast cancer is a malignant tumor of the glandular tissue of the breast. It is proposed to use infrared spectroscopy of blood serum as a simple and quick way to detect breast cancer. The paper presents the results of research using the methods of multivariate processing of IR spectra of human blood serum obtained by ATR-FTIR spectroscopy. The paper presents the results of research using the methods of multivariate processing of IR spectra of human blood serum obtained by ATR-FTIR spectroscopy. A sufficiently large sample of patients and healthy donors was diagnosed. Blood samples are examined from 66 patients who are clinically diagnosed with breast cancer and 80 healthy volunteers. A feature of the applied approach was a combination of the method of principal component analysis (PCA) and principal component regression (PCR) for processing the IR spectra of blood serum. The PCA method allows us to determine the spectral bands referring for the intensity differences between the control group and the patient group. Shown, that the range of 1306-1250cm^-1 in the IR spectrum of blood serum is diagnostically significant for breast cancer. This range corresponds to the vibrations of several functional groups of DNA and RNA, which play a key role in discrimination in breast cancer screening using ATR-FTIR spectroscopy. It is shown that the proposed method has advantages in ease of use for clinical diagnosis and gives good results for the identification of breast cancer. The values of sensitivity (92.3%) and specificity (87.1%) obtained using the PCR method are close to those of mammography and ultrasound. This indicates the possibility of using this method in real clinical laboratory diagnostics.