Serum protein profile study of normal and cervical cancer subjects by high performance liquid chromatography with laser-induced fluorescence.

High performance liquid chromatography with high sensitivity laser-induced fluorescence detection is used to study the protein profiles of serum samples from healthy volunteers and cervical cancer subjects. The protein profiles are subjected to principal component analysis (PCA). PCA shows that the large number of chromatograms of a given class of serum samples--say normal/malignant--can be expressed in terms of a small number of factors (principal components). Three parameters--scores of the factors, squared residuals, and Mahalanobis distance--are derived from PCA. The parameters are observed to have a narrow range for protein profiles of standard calibration sets formed from groups of clinically confirmed normal/malignant classes. Limit tests using match/no match of the parameters of any test sample with parameters derived for the standard calibration sets give very good discrimination between malignant and normal samples with high sensitivity (approximately 100%) aand specificity (approximately 94%).