Chemometric Methods for Biomedical Raman Spectroscopy and Imaging

Abstract

The vibrational spectrum is a quantitative measure of a sample’s molecular composition. Hence, classical chemometric methods, especially regression-based, have focused on exact mapping between identity and sample composition. While this approach works well for molecular identifications and scientific investigations, problems of biomedical interest often involve complex mixtures of stochastically varying compositions and complex spatial distributions of molecules contributing to the recorded signals. Hence, the challenge often is not to predict the identity of materials but to determine chemical markers that help rapidly detect species (e.g. impurities, conformations, strains of bacteria) in large areas or indicate changes in function in complex tissue (e.g. cancer or tissue engineering). Hence, the rate of data analysis has to be rapid, has to be robust with respect to stochastic variance and the provided information is usually related to biomedical context and not to molecular compositions. The emergence of imaging techniques and clinical applications are spurring growth in this area. In this chapter, we discuss chemometric methods that are useful in this milieu. We first review methods for data pre-processing with a focus on the key challenges facing a spectroscopist. Next, we survey some of the well known, widely used pattern classification techniques under the framework of supervised and unsupervised classification. We discuss the applicability, advantages and drawbacks of each of these techniques and help the reader not only gain useful insights into the techniques themselves but also acquire an understating of the underlying ideas and principles. We conclude by providing examples of the coupled use of chemometric and statistical tools to develop robust classification protocols for prostate and breast tissue pathology. We specifically focus on the critical factors and pitfalls at each step in converting spectral data sets into hi-fidelity images useful for decision making.