Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy Analysis of Human Breast Cancer via Silver Nanoparticles: An Examination of Fabrication Methods

Breast cancer in a traditional way is diagnosed using mammography, computer tomography, ultrasounds, biopsy, and finally, histopathological analysis. Histopathological analysis is a gold standard in breast cancer diagnostics; however, it is time consuming and prone to the human interpretations. That is why new methods based on optical properties of analyzed human tissue samples are needed to be introduced to the clinical practice objective, costless and fast diagnostic protocols. Nowadays, Raman spectroscopy-based methods are gaining more and more importance. Raman spectroscopy and imaging allow to characterize human tissue samples using an electromagnetic radiation from a safe range, and simultaneously, a minimal sample preparation is required. During measurements, a natural differentiation in tissues components’ scattering cross sections is used to build 2D and 3D maps of the chemical component distribution. The paper presents the application of SERS (surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy) measurements for analysis of human breast cancer (adenocarcinoma). The advantages of SERS application in cancer diagnostics are also discussed. Moreover, the detailed chemical composition of human breast cancer tissue based on Raman bands of DNA/RNA, amino acids, lipids, and proteins which are significantly enhanced is presented. Three different methods of NP preparation are presented, and the effectiveness of Raman signal enhancement of Ag nanoparticles synthetized by these methods is compared. The enhancement effect of NPs synthetized by reduction of silver nitrate with sodium borohydride (method no. 1) and silver nitrate-hydroxylamine hydrochloride reduction (method no. 2) was stronger when compared with the polyol method (method no. 3). Presented SERS results confirmed that the clearly resolved and high-intensity Raman spectra of cancer human breast tissue can be recorded using integration times of the order of fractional seconds and one milliwatt of the excitation laser power.