Raman spectroscopy on blood serum probes of patients with end-stage liver disease
Raman spectroscopy has shown to be a promising method for the examination of biomedical samples. However, until now, its efficacy has not been established in clinical diagnostics. In this study, Raman spectroscopy's potential application in medical laboratories is evaluated for a large variety (38) of biomarkers. Given 234 serum samples from a cohort of patients with different stages of liver disease, we performed Raman spectroscopy at 780nm excitation frequency. The Raman spectra were analyzed in combination with the results of routine diagnostics using specifically developed complex mathematical algorithms, including fluorescence filtering, frequency subset selection and several overfitting circumventing strategies, such as independent validation. Given this cohort of patients, a significant proof-of-concept study was completed. The results reveal that Raman spectroscopy has high potential for use in medical laboratory diagnostics to simultaneously quantify multiple biomarkers.