Cancer Discrimination Using Fourier Transform Near-Infrared Spectroscopy with Chemometric Models

Abstract

Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy technique offers many potential advantages as tool for biomedical analysis since it enables the subtle biochemical signatures related to pathology to be detected and extracted. In conjunction with advanced chemometrics, NIR spectroscopy opens the possibility of their use in cancer diagnosis. The study focuses on the application of near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and classification models for discriminating colorectal cancer. A total of 107 surgical specimens and a corresponding NIR diffuse reflection spectral dataset were prepared. Three preprocessing methods were attempted and least-squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) was used to build a classification model. The hybrid preprocessing of first derivative and principal component analysis (PCA) resulted in the best LS-SVM model with the sensitivity and specificity of 0.96 and 0.96 for the training and 0.94 and 0.96 for test sets, respectively. The similarity performance on both subsets indicated that overfitting did not occur, assuring the robustness and reliability of the developed LS-SVM model. The area of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was 0.99, demonstrating once again the high prediction power of the model. The result confirms the applicability of the combination of NIR spectroscopy, LS-SVM, PCA, and first derivative preprocessing for cancer diagnosis.