Characterization and discrimination of human breast cancer and normal breast tissues using resonance Raman spectroscopy

Worldwide breast cancer incidence has increased by more than twenty percent in the past decade. It is also known that in that time, mortality due to the affliction has increased by fourteen percent. Using optical-based diagnostic techniques, such as Raman spectroscopy, has been explored to increase diagnostic accuracy in a more objective way along with significantly decreasing diagnostic wait-times. In this study, Raman spectroscopy with 532-nm excitation was used to incite resonance effects to enhance Stokes scattering from unique biomolecular vibrational modes. Seventy-two Raman spectra (41 cancerous, 31 normal) were collected from nine breast tissue samples. Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) was employed to extract characteristic spectra from the processed data for characterization. The resulting cross-validation using two selective feature components resulted in discriminative sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of 92.6{\%}, 100{\%} and 96.0{\%} respectively.