Label-free discrimination of different stage nasopharyngeal carcinoma tissue based on Raman spectroscopy.

The present study aimed to evaluate a label-free tissue test for the detection of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) at early and advanced stages using Raman spectroscopy (RS). RS measurements were performed to acquire high quality Raman spectra on two groups of tissue samples: One group consists of 30 NPC patients at the early stages (I-II), and the other group is 46 NPC patients at the advanced stages (III-IV). Tentative assignment of Raman bands showed specific biomolecular changes associated with cancer development. Furthermore, effective diagnostic algorithms based on principal components analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) were applied for distinguishing Raman spectra of nasopharyngeal tissues from different stages, yielding a diagnostic sensitivity of 70% and a specificity of 78%. This exploratory work suggests that RS in conjunction with the PCA-LDA algorithms provides good diagnostic ability for the early and the advanced staged NPC tissues, and RS has enormous potential for the non-invasive detection of early and advanced stage NPC.