An effective approach to the early diagnosis of colorectal cancer based on three-dimensional fluorescence spectra of human blood plasma.

Abstract Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a common malignancy in the gastrointestinal tract, and its screening rates remain relatively low in the general population due to the lack of specific symptoms and effective methods. It is still in urgent need to develop rapid and reliable approach to the early diagnosis of CRC. Herein, based on the three-dimensional (3D) fluorescence spectra of human blood plasma, a combination strategy of Tchebichef image moments coupled with partial least squares-discriminate analysis (TM-PLS-DA) was proposed for the detection of CRC from three classes (CRC samples, adenomas samples and non-malignant findings). The established TM-PLS-DA classification model provided an 84 % correct classification for CRC prediction. Venetian blinds 10-fold cross validation was carried out. The error rates both in cross validation and test sets were less than 0.16. Sensitivity and specificity for CRC prediction were 0.95 and 0.88, respectively. At the same time, the diagnostic capacity of the proposed method was tested by receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analysis with area under the curve (AUC) of 0.94 for CRC diagnosis. These results demonstrate that the proposed TM-PLS-DA method based on the 3D fluorescence spectra of blood plasma has great advantage for the accurate CRC detection, which will provide a potential alternative approach for cancer diagnostics.