Characterization of biomarkers in blood serum for cancer diagnosis in dogs using Raman spectroscopy

Biomarkers of cancer in sera of domestic dogs were detected through Raman spectroscopy with 830 nm excitation. Raman spectra of sera from 61 dogs (31 healthy and 30 with cancer, resulting in 154 and 200 spectra, respectively) were submitted to principal component analysis (PCA) for feature extraction and partial least squares (PLS) regression for discrimination between Healthy and Cancer groups. In the PCA, the peaks at 1132, 1342, 1368, and 1453 cm^-1 (albumin and phenylalanine) were higher for the Cancer group. The "redshift" of the peaks at 621, 1003, and 1032 cm^-1 (conformational change in proteins and/or bonds at sites close to the aromatic ring of amino acids) occurred in the Cancer group, and the peaks at 451 cm^-1 (tryptophan) and 1441 cm^-1 (lipids) were higher for the Healthy group. The PLS-DA classified the serum spectra in Healthy and Cancer groups with high accuracy (78%).