Maryam Siddra, Konugolu Venkata Sekar Sanathana, Ghauri M Daniyal, Fahy Edward, Nogueira Marcelo Saito, Lu Huihui, Beffara Flavien, Humbert Georges, Ni Riordain Richeal, Sheahan Patrick, Burke Ray, Wei Kho Kiang, Gautam Rekha, Andersson-Engels Stefan
Tyndall National Institute, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland.
Cork University Dental School and Hospital, Wilton, Cork, Ireland.
Analyst. 2023 Mar 27;148(7):1514-1523. doi: 10.1039/d2an01921c.
Early diagnosis of oral cancer is critical to improve the survival rate of patients. Raman spectroscopy, a non-invasive spectroscopic technique, has shown potential in identifying early-stage oral cancer biomarkers in the oral cavity environment. However, inherently weak signals necessitate highly sensitive detectors, which restricts widespread usage due to high setup costs. In this research, the fabrication and assembly of a customised Raman system that can adapt three different configurations for the and analysis is reported. This novel design will help in reducing the cost required to have multiple Raman instruments specific for a given application. First, we demonstrated the capability of a customized microscope for acquiring Raman signals from a single cell with high signal-to-noise ratio. Generally, when working with liquid samples with low concentration of analytes (such as saliva) under a microscope, excitation light interacts with a small sample volume, which may not be representative of whole sample. To address this issue, we have designed a novel long-path transmission set-up, which was found to be sensitive towards low concentration of analytes in aqueous solution. We further demonstrated that the same Raman system can be incorporated with the multimodal fibre optical probe to collect data from oral tissues. In summary, this flexible, portable, multi-configuration Raman system has the potential to provide a cost-effective solution for complete screening of precancer oral lesions.
口腔癌的早期诊断对于提高患者生存率至关重要。拉曼光谱作为一种非侵入性光谱技术，已显示出在口腔环境中识别早期口腔癌生物标志物的潜力。然而，其固有的微弱信号需要高灵敏度探测器，这因设置成本高而限制了广泛应用。在本研究中，报告了一种定制拉曼系统的制造和组装，该系统可采用三种不同配置进行 和 分析。这种新颖的设计将有助于降低针对特定应用配备多台拉曼仪器所需的成本。首先，我们展示了定制显微镜从单个细胞获取高信噪比拉曼信号的能力。一般来说，在显微镜下处理分析物浓度低的液体样品（如唾液）时，激发光与小体积样品相互作用，这可能不代表整个样品。为解决此问题，我们设计了一种新颖的长程透射装置，发现它对水溶液中低浓度分析物敏感。我们进一步证明，同一拉曼系统可与多模光纤探头结合，从口腔组织收集 数据。总之，这种灵活、便携、多配置的拉曼系统有潜力为癌前口腔病变的全面筛查提供经济高效的解决方案。
