Label-free detection of blood plasma using silver nanoparticle based surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy for esophageal cancer screening.

A surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) based on silver nanoparticle technology was applied to analyze and classify human blood plasma with the aim to develop a simple and label-free blood test for esophageal cancer detection. High quality SERS spectra in the range of 400-1800 cm(-1) can be acquired from 36 esophageal cancer patients and 50 healthy volunteers' blood plasma samples. Tentative assignments of the SERS bands indicated specific biomolecular changes associated with cancer transformation, including an increase in the relative amounts of nucleic acid and phenylalanine, a decrease in the percentage of saccharide and proteins contents in the cancer blood plasma compared to that of healthy subjects. Furthermore, both SVM and PCA-LDA diagnostic algorithm were employed to analyze and classify the obtained blood plasma SERS spectra between normal and cancer plasma with a high diagnostic accuracy (around 90%). This exploratory work demonstrates that the label-free plasma SERS analysis technique in conjunction with SVM and PCA-LDA diagnostic algorithms has great potential for improving esophageal cancer detection and screening.