Urological applications of Raman spectroscopy for improved malignant diagnostics

The incidence of both prostate and bladder cancer is high; prostate cancer being the most frequently diagnosed non-cutaneous cancer affecting Western men. At present the gold standard for diagnosis of pathologies within the bladder and the prostate gland is by means of histological examination of biopsies. This is a subjective means of examining tissue and has an element of both inter and intra-observer variability. A large number of specimens have been collected and analysed using both a NIR-Raman spectrometer and histopathology with H&E staining. Multivariate spectral prediction models have been constructed and tested. An evaluation of misclassification cost models and the use of cancer staging data to train the models has been made.