Establishing spectrochemical changes in the natural history of oesophageal adenocarcinoma from tissue Raman mapping analysis

Raman spectroscopy is a fast and sensitive technique able to identify molecular changes in biological specimens. Herein, we report on three cases where Raman microspectroscopy was used to distinguish normal vs. oesophageal adenocarcinoma (OAC) (case 1) and Barrett’s oesophagus vs. OAC (cases 2 and 3) in a non-destructive and highly accurate fashion. Normal and OAC tissues were discriminated using principal component analysis plus linear discriminant analysis (PCA-LDA) with 97% accuracy (94% sensitivity and 100% specificity) (case 1); Barrett’s oesophagus vs. OAC tissues were discriminated with accuracies ranging from 98 to 100% (97–100% sensitivity and 100% specificity). Spectral markers responsible for class differentiation were obtained through the difference-between-mean spectrum for each group and the PCA loadings, where C–O–C skeletal mode in β-glucose (900 cm(−1)), lipids (967 cm(−1)), phosphodioxy (1296 cm(−1)), deoxyribose (1456 cm(−1)) and collagen (1445, 1665 cm(−1)) were associated with normal and OAC tissue differences. Phenylalanine (1003 cm(−1)), proline/collagen (1066, 1445 cm(−1)), phospholipids (1130 cm(−1)), CH(2) angular deformation (1295 cm(−1)), disaccharides (1462 cm(−1)) and proteins (amide I, 1672/5 cm(−1)) were associated with Barrett’s oesophagus and OAC tissue differences. These findings show the potential of using Raman microspectroscopy imaging for fast and accurate diagnoses of oesophageal pathologies and establishing subtle molecular changes predisposing to adenocarcinoma in a clinical setting. [Figure: see text] ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s00216-020-02637-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.