Molecular breast cancer subtype identification using photoacoustic spectral analysis and machine learning at the biomacromolecular level.

Breast cancer threatens the health of women worldwide, and its molecular subtypes largely determine the therapy and prognosis of patients. However, an uncomplicated and accurate method to identify subtypes is currently lacking. This study utilized photoacoustic spectral analysis (PASA) based on the partial least squares discriminant algorithm (PLS-DA) to identify molecular breast cancer subtypes at the biomacromolecular level in vivo. The area of power spectrum density (APSD) was extracted to semi-quantify the biomacromolecule content. The feature wavelengths were obtained via the variable importance in projection (VIP) score and the selectivity ratio (Sratio), to identify the biomarkers. The PASA achieved an accuracy of 84%. Most of the feature wavelengths fell into the collagen-dominated absorption waveband, which was consistent with the histopathological results. This paper proposes a successful method for identifying molecular breast cancer subtypes and proves that collagen can be treated as a biomarker for molecular breast cancer subtyping.