Raman spectra of human colorectal tissue samples were employed to diagnose colorectal cancer. High-quality Raman spectra were acquired from normal and cancerous colorectal tissues from 81 patients. Subtle Raman variations, such as for peaks at 1134 cm−1 (protein, C-C/C-N stretching) and 1297 cm−1 (lipid, C-H2 twisting), were observed between normal and cancerous colorectal tissues. The average peak intensity at 1134 and 1297 cm−1 was increased from approximately 235 and 72 in the normal group, respectively, to 315 and 273 in the cancer group. The variations of Raman spectra reflected the changes of cell molecules during canceration. The multivariate statistical methods of principal component analysis-linear discriminant analysis (PCA-LDA) and partial least-squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), together with leave-one-patient-out cross-validation, were employed to build the discrimination model. PCA-LDA was used to evaluate the capability of this approach for classifying colorectal cancer, resulting in a diagnostic accuracy of 79.2%. Further PLS-DA modeling yielded a diagnostic accuracy of 84.3% for colorectal cancer detection. Thus, the PLS-DA model is preferable between the two to discriminate cancerous from normal tissues. Our results demonstrate that Raman spectroscopy can be used with an optimized multivariate data analysis model as a sensitive diagnostic alternative to identify pathological changes in the colon at the molecular level.

Our results provide the first direct evidence of a biolayer on biogenic AuNPs and unveil the AuNP biogenic process and mechanisms.

Subcellular Raman analysis is a promising clinic tool for cancer diagnosis, but constrained by the difficulty of deciphering subcellular spectra in actual human tissues. We report a label-free subcellular Raman analysis for use in cancer diagnosis that integrates subcellular signature spectra by subtracting cytoplasm from nucleus spectra (Nuc.-Cyt.) with a partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) model. Raman mapping with the classical least-squares (CLS) model allowed direct visualization of the distribution of the cytoplasm and nucleus. The PLS-DA model was employed to evaluate the diagnostic performance of five types of spectral datasets, including non-selective, nucleus, cytoplasm, ratio of nucleus to cytoplasm (Nuc./Cyt.), and nucleus minus cytoplasm (Nuc.-Cyt.), resulting in diagnostic sensitivity of 88.3%, 84.0%, 98.4%, 84.5%, and 98.9%, respectively. Discriminating between normal and cancerous cells of actual human tissues through subcellular Raman markers is feasible, especially when using the nucleus-cytoplasm difference spectra. The subcellular Raman approach had good stability, and had excellent diagnostic performance for rectal as well as colon tissues. The insights gained from this study shed new light on the general applicability of subcellular Raman analysis in clinical trials.