Study on characteristic intrinsic fluorescence spectra of urine from ovarian cancer patients

Abstract

Ovarian cancer has the highest mortality rate among the gynecologic cancers, and it goes undetected because adequate technology does not exist to detect preinvasive or early stage disease. Fluorescence spectroscopy of urine may provide a cost-effective tool to improve precancer detection. This study describes initial investigation of the potential of intrinsic urine fluorescence spectra for detecting early ovarian cancer.Using the Xenon arc lamp to irradiate the urine from ovarian cancer, cervical carcinoma groups and healthy donors, we obtained fluorescence emission spectra. The three groups of samples show different emission spectra peak and fluorescence intensity. Ovarian cancer group has the largest displacement of maximum spectra peak at 380-400nm excitation wavelength. And the fluorescence intensity from ovarian cancer group is significantly higher with the healthy donors and cervical carcinoma group in comparison at the short wave excitation region of 320-360nm, while cervical carcinoma group has higher fluorescence intensity than ovarian cancer group at 380-500nm excitation. Characteristic fluorescence mechanism was studied through comparison of fluorescence spectra and software fitting image. Fluorescence spectra at 440nm excitation is found to be perfectly lorentzian fitted by three characteristic fluorescence peaks, which are originated form coproporphyrin, riboflavin and p-hydroxyphenol derivatives existing in the urine.

Changes in urine autofluorescence in ovarian cancer patients

“…However, there is no self quenching of excess of flavines concentration in urine at our conditions (data not presented), and we detected an increased fluorescence shifted 60 nm from the flavines peak (from 480 to 540 nm), we therefore think that another change is responsible for the increasing of fluorescence at 540 nm, as do Masilamani et al [23]. To our knowledge, Lu et al were first who tested urine in ovarian cancer with a similar finding who considered the interplay of coproporphyrin, riboflavin and p-hydroxyphenol derivatives existing in urine [34]. Zvarík et al used excitation-emission matrices of undiluted urine in ovarian cancer screening.…”

“…In addition, autofluorescence of urine was reported in conjunction to renal diseases [24] and urinary tract infection [25]. To our knowledge, only Lu et al [26] has described urine autofluorescence as potential diagnostic tool for ovarian cancer patients, but without providing information about the number of tested groups of healthy and diseased patients.…”