Abstract
The recent improvements in diagnosis enabled by advances in liquid biopsy and oncological imaging significantly better cancer care. Both these complementary approaches, which are used for early tumor detection, characterization, and monitoring, can benefit from applying techniques based on surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). With a detection sensitivity at the single-molecule level, SERS spectroscopy is widely used in cell and molecular biology, and its capability for the in vitro detection of several types of cancer biomarkers is well established. In the last few years, several intriguing SERS applications have emerged, including in vivo imaging for tumor targeting and the monitoring of drug release. In this paper, selected recent developments and trends in SERS applications in the field of liquid biopsy and tumor imaging are critically reviewed, with a special emphasis on results that demonstrate the clinical utility of SERS.
Highlights
When photons interact with matter, several scattering phenomena, either elastic or inelastic, can occur
From the application point of view, Raman scattering [1,2] is the most attractive inelastic scattering phenomenon, since it is widely used to characterize organic and inorganic samples by monitoring the intensity and wavelength of light inelastically scattered from the atoms/molecules forming a sample
In order to overcome this crucial drawback, samples can be placed on a nanostructured surface to enhance the Raman signal by a factor of up to 1016 according to two mechanisms: electromagnetic enhancement due to optical field confinement in nanometer-scale regions called hot spots and chemical enhancement, which refers to contributions to Raman scattering that do not rely on the spatial distribution of the electromagnetic field [3–5]
Summary
When photons interact with matter, several scattering phenomena, either elastic or inelastic, can occur. Raman scattering has a key issue—the extremely small cross-section of the Raman process, which is 12–14 orders of magnitude below the cross-section of fluorescence. In order to overcome this crucial drawback, samples can be placed on a nanostructured surface to enhance the Raman signal by a factor of up to 1016 according to two mechanisms: electromagnetic enhancement due to optical field confinement in nanometer-scale regions called hot spots and chemical enhancement, which refers to contributions to Raman scattering that do not rely on the spatial distribution of the electromagnetic field [3–5]. Due to its evident advantages over Raman scattering, SERS has become a powerful tool in biophysics/biochemistry and life sciences. Recent emerging experimental evidence indicates that dielectric metasurfaces have the potential to produce the SERS enhancement of an extent equivalent to that of plasmonic substrates [10], but further studies are required before the use of dielectric/semiconducting substrates in SERS experiments becomes widespread.
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