Attenuated Total Reflection Fourier Transform Infrared (ATR-FTIR) in the discrimination of normal and oral cancer blood plasma

Abstract

Oral cancer is the most frequent type of cancer that occurs with 75000 to 80000 new cases reported every year in India. The carcinogens from tobacco and related products are the main cause for the oral cancer. ATR-FTIR method is label free, fast and cost-effective diagnostic method would allow for rapid diagnostic results in earlier stages by the minimal chemical changes occur in the biological metabolites available in the blood plasma. The present study reports the use of ATR-FTIR data with advanced statistical model (LDA-ANN) in the diagnosis of oral cancer from normal with better accuracy. The infrared spectra were acquired on ATR-FTIR Jasco spectrophotometer at 4 cm -1 resolution, 30 scans, in the 1800-900 cm -1 spectral range. Each sample had 5 spectra recorded from each blood plasma sample. The spectral data were routed through the multilayer perception of artificial neural network to evaluate for the statistical efficacy. Among the spectral data it was found that amide II (1486 cm -1 ) and lipid (1526 cm -1 ) affords about 90 % in the discrimination between groups using LDA. These preliminary results indicate that ATR-FTIR is useful to differentiate normal subject from oral cancer patients using blood plasma.