Recent omics analyses of human biofluids provide opportunities to probe selected species of biomolecules for disease diagnostics. Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy investigates the full repertoire of molecular species within a sample at once. Here, we present a multi-institutional study in which we analysed infrared fingerprints of plasma and serum samples from 1639 individuals with different solid tumours and carefully matched symptomatic and non-symptomatic reference individuals. Focusing on breast, bladder, prostate, and lung cancer, we find that infrared molecular fingerprinting is capable of detecting cancer: training a support vector machine algorithm allowed us to obtain binary classification performance in the range of 0.78-0.89 (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [AUC]), with a clear correlation between AUC and tumour load. Intriguingly, we find that the spectral signatures differ between different cancer types. This study lays the foundation for high-throughput onco-IR-phenotyping of four common cancers, providing a cost-effective, complementary analytical tool for disease recognition.
- Huber, M.
- Kepesidis, K. V.
- Voronina, L.
- Fleischmann, F.
- Fill, E.
- Hermann, J.
- Koch, I.
- Milger-Kneidinger, K.
- Kolben, T.
- Schulz, G. B.
- Jokisch, F.
- Behr, J.
- Harbeck, N.
- Reiser, M.
- Stief, C.
- Krausz, F.
- Zigman, M.
Keywords
- cancer detection
- human
- infrared spectroscopy
- liquid biopsy
- medicine
- phenotyping
- interests declared
