Combination of Optical Biopsy with Patient Data for Improvement of Skin Tumor Identification

In this study, patient data were combined with Raman and autofluorescence spectral parameters for more accurate identification of skin tumors. The spectral and patient data of skin tumors were classified by projection on latent structures and discriminant analysis. The importance of patient risk factors was determined using statistical improvement of ROC AUCs when spectral parameters were combined with risk factors. Gender, age and tumor localization were found significant for classification of malignant versus benign neoplasms, resulting in improvement of ROC AUCs from 0.610 to 0.818 (p < 0.05). To distinguish melanoma versus pigmented skin tumors, the same factors significantly improved ROC AUCs from 0.709 to 0.810 (p < 0.05) when analyzed together according to the spectral data, but insignificantly (p > 0.05) when analyzed individually. For classification of melanoma versus seborrheic keratosis, no statistical improvement of ROC AUC was observed when the patient data were added to the spectral data. In all three classification models, additional risk factors such as occupational hazards, family history, sun exposure, size, and personal history did not statistically improve the ROC AUCs. In summary, combined analysis of spectral and patient data can be significant for certain diagnostic tasks: patient data demonstrated the distribution of skin tumor incidence in different demographic groups, whereas tumors within each group were distinguished using the spectral differences.