Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
(a)
(b)
Normal
Cancer
Misclassified
Distance to normal
Distance to normal
(c)
Distance to normal
Figure 21.7
Quality of discrimination of healthy and cancer cases by LDA.
All the previous sections have confirmed that the main research activities for cancer diagnosis by FTIR
spectrometry have been dedicated to analysis of tissue analysis. According to pathological documents there
are some concerns about tissue sampling. Usually the general process is low speed for sample preparation;
biopsy samples are very heterogeneous comprising several types of cells and many biochemical components;
preparation procedures of biopsy samples are time consuming and difficult to operate while fixation and
embedding steps in biopsy preparation procedure may cause some distorting in cell structure and even
dissolve some useful biochemicals. On the other hand, prepared biopsies are very sensitive to maintaining
conditions prior to analysis. In some cases accessing the body organ from which the sample is required is
really difficult, causing some trouble; finally, biopsy operation is usually invasive and may accelerate the
spreading process of disease.
During the last decade noticeable attention was paid to propose some new analytical approaches which
could be a substitute for tissue biopsy sampling, while easier providing and analysis is possible and reliable
results are achieved. The effective role of IR spectroscopy in clinical diagnostic via body fluid analysis could
be named as a key for problem solving. Cancer infected cells will lose their related adhesion strength and
would be separated easily, even traveling via body fluids from the malignant site to healthy ones. This process
is the main argument for metastasis. Blood is a body fluid, distributed all around the body and would be called
as one of the main traveling media for malignant cellular structures. Thus it is possible to propose a method
