Analysis of tuberculosis disease through Raman spectroscopy and machine learning

Abstract We present the effectiveness of Raman spectroscopy (RS) in combination with machine learning for screening and analysis of blood sera collected from tuberculosis patients. Blood samples of 60 patients have confirmed active pulmonary tuberculosis and 14 samples of healthy age matched control were used in the current study. Spectra from entire sera samples were acquired using 785 nm laser Raman system. Support Vector Machine (SVM) together with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has been used for highlighting variations spectral intensities between healthy and pathological samples. SVM model using Gaussian radial basis is able to discriminate between healthy and diseased patients based on the differences in the concentration of essential biomolecules such as lactate, β-carotene, and amide-I. Diagnostic accuracy of 92%, with precision, specificity and sensitivity of 95%, 98% and 81%, respectively, were achieved considering PC3 and PC4. Automatic analysis of the variations in the concentration of these molecules together with chemometrics can effectively be utilized for an early screening of tuberculosis through minimum invasion.