Vibrational biospectroscopy coupled with multivariate analysis extracts potentially diagnostic features in blood plasma/serum of ovarian cancer patients

Despite numerous advances in “omics” research, early detection of ovarian cancer still remains a challenge. The aim of this study was to determine whether attenuated total reflection Fourier‐transform infrared (ATR‐FTIR) or Raman spectroscopy could characterise alterations in the biomolecular signatures of human blood plasma/serum obtained from ovarian cancer patients compared to non‐cancer controls. Blood samples isolated from ovarian cancer patients ( n = 30) and healthy controls ( n = 30) were analysed using ATR‐FTIR spectroscopy. For comparison, a smaller cohort of samples ( n = 8) were analysed using an InVia Renishaw Raman spectrometer. Resultant spectra were pre‐processed prior to being inputted into principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA). Statistically significant differences ( P < 0.001) were observed between spectra of ovarian cancer versus control subjects for both biospectroscopy methods. Using a support vector machine classifier for Raman spectra of blood plasma, a diagnostic accuracy of 74% was achieved, while the same classifier showed 93.3% accuracy for IR spectra of blood plasma. These observations suggest that a biospectroscopy approach could be applied to identify spectral alterations associated with the presence of insidious ovarian cancer. (© 2014 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)