ProRaman: a program to classify Raman spectra.

The program ProRaman, developed for the Matlab platform, provides an interactive and flexible graphic interface to develop efficient algorithms to classify Raman spectra into two or three different classes. A set of preprocessing algorithms to decrease the variable dimensionality and to extract the main features which improve the correct classification ratio was implemented. The implemented classification algorithms were based on the Mahalanobis distance and neural network. To verify the functionality of the developed program, 72 spectra from human artery samples, 36 of which had been histopathologically diagnosed as non-diseased and 36 as having an atherosclerotic lesion, were processed using a combination of different preprocessing and classification techniques. The best result was accomplished when the variables were selected from the Raman spectrum shift range from 1200 to 1700 cm(-1), then preprocessed using wavelets for compression and principal component analysis for feature extraction and, finally, classified by a multilayer perceptron with one hidden layer with eight neurons.