Attenuated Total Reflection Fourier Transform Infrared (ATR‐FTIR) spectral discrimination of brain tumour severity from serum samples

Abstract

Gliomas are the most frequent primary brain tumours in adults with over 9,000 people diagnosed each year in the UK. A rapid, reagent-free and cost-effective diagnostic regime using serum spectroscopy would allow for rapid diagnostic results and for swift treatment planning and monitoring within the clinical environment. We report the use of ATR-FTIR spectral data combined with a RBF-SVM for the diagnosis of gliomas (high-grade and low-grade) from non-cancer with sensitivities and specificities on average of 93.75 and 96.53% respectively. The proposed diagnostic regime has the ability to reduce mortality and morbidity rates.

Vibrational spectroscopic analysis of body fluids: avoiding molecular contamination using centrifugal filtration

“…The spectra of the filtrates were taken from samples which were processed using unwashed centrifugal filter devices. [34][35][36][37][38][39][40] .…”

“…It generally requires less than 10  L to be deposited on the ATR crystal, which is then air dried to reduce the water contribution in the data collected. Due to the extremely small volume used, only a few minutes are necessary to obtain a thin dry biofilm that can be recorded 24,34 .…”

“…Moreover, it presents the possibility to rapidly separate protein fractions with different molecular weight according to the cut-off points selected, which can considerably improve the sensitivity of disease detection by removing the most abundant high molecular weight proteins, thus revealing spectral features usually hidden from the less abundant low molecular weight molecules [36][37][38] . It is likely that such centrifugal devices will become increasingly popular for applications of vibrational spectroscopy to analysis of bodily fluids and already preliminary work can be found in the literature 24,34 However, many concerns have to be addressed before being able to evaluate their benefits for diagnostic purposes. The high sensitivity of the vibrational techniques is often used as an argument for their potential to visualize minor modifications in the molecular profiles from different samples.…”

Vibrational spectroscopy of biofluids for disease screening or diagnosis: translation from the laboratory to a clinical setting

“…With 30 patients in each group that is in itself a bias, clearly larger datasets with different grades and sub-types of ovarian cancer are needed to validate this study but these findings suggest what this area can offer in the screening and diagnosis of this disease. ATR-FTIR spectroscopy has been used to demonstrate a high level of diagnostic accuracy in the detection and classification of gliomas, malignant brain tumours that are responsible for 50% of intracranial lesions [48,49]. Current diagnostic options for these types of tumours include CT and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans but ultimately these rely on an inpatient diagnostic brain biopsy, a highly invasive procedure.…”

A review of novel analytical diagnostics for liquid biopsies: spectroscopic and spectrometric serum profiling of primary and secondary brain tumors

“…Gliomas occurring from the glial cells within the brain and central nervous system (CNS) (Hands et al. 2014) are the most common primary brain tumor classified by World Health Organisation (WHO) (Louis et al. 2007).…”