Raman spectroscopic study of benign and malignant ovarian tissues

Abstract

Ovarian cancer is one of the most common female tumors all over the world, and its mortality rate ranks first among gynecological malignancies. A progressive assessment, diagnosis and remedy are significant for the proper management of the disease process. In this paper, a prompt, non-invasive and highly effective screening test for ovarian cancer was developed based on the Raman spectroscopy (RS) data of fresh ovarian tissues. Raman spectral measurements were performed on fresh ovarian tissue samples from 17 ovarian cancer patients and 14 benign ovarian tumors. We preliminarily identified the Raman peaks in the measured ovarian tissue spectra and summarized their respective characteristic peaks, indicating that specific biomolecules changed among different groups, and their differences were analyzed. The conclusions suggested that the position of the characteristic peaks of Raman spectrum of the ovarian cancer tissues and benign ovarian tissues were different. The relative intensity of ovarian cancer tissue was higher than that of benign ovarian tissue at the 1004, 1155, 1446 cm−1 with phenylalanine, protein and lipids as characteristic peaks, and the difference were significant (P < 0.05). This exploratory work demonstrates that RS may be used as a detection method for screening benign and malignant ovarian tumors.