Raman Spectroscopic Characterization of Saliva for the Discrimination of Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Abstract

This study presents a proof-of-concept application of Raman spectroscopy for analyzing saliva samples and diagnosing oral squamous cell carcinoma. The investigation first focuses on providing a protocol appropriate for the preparation of saliva samples to be investigated using Raman spectroscopy. Several easy methods for preparing the samples are presented and the acquired Raman signals are examined for each case. The most suitable protocol was selected and further applied for saliva samples collected from healthy volunteers and oral cancer suffering patients. The study further aims to discriminate between the Raman spectra collected from both groups using multivariate statistical methods.

Keywords:

• Diagnosis
• oral cancer
• principal components analysis
• Raman spectroscopy
• saliva

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant of the CNCS-UEFISCDI, project code PN-III-P1-1.1-PD-2016-1057.