The road map towards providing a robust Raman spectroscopy-based cancer diagnostic platform and integration into clinic

Despite the demonstrated potential as an accurate cancer diagnostic tool, Raman spectroscopy (RS) is yet to be adopted by the clinic for histopathology reviews. The Stratified Medicine through Advanced Raman Technologies (SMART) consortium has begun to address some of the hurdles in its adoption for cancer diagnosis. These hurdles include awareness and acceptance of the technology, practicality of integration into the histopathology workflow, data reproducibility and availability of transferrable models. We have formed a consortium, in joint efforts, to develop optimised protocols for tissue sample preparation, data collection and analysis. These protocols will be supported by provision of suitable hardware and software tools to allow statistically sound classification models to be built and transferred for use on different systems. In addition, we are building a validated gastrointestinal (GI) cancers model, which can be trialled as part of the histopathology workflow at hospitals, and a classification tool. At the end of the project, we aim to deliver a robust Raman based diagnostic platform to enable clinical researchers to stage cancer, define tumour margin, build cancer diagnostic models and discover novel disease bio markers.