The efficacy of Raman spectroscopy in the diagnosis of esophageal cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Esophageal cancer is characterized by its high occurrence rate and difficulty to treat successfully, therefore early diagnosis is extremely important. Our article is aimed to comprehensively analyze the relative effectiveness of Raman spectroscopy (RS) in the diagnosis of suspected esophageal cancer. METHODS: We performed a systemic search in PubMed, EMBASE, CNKI and Web of science from 2007 to 2020. We used the diagnostic data of true positive (TP), false positive (FP), true negative (TN) and false negative (FN) to estimate the pooled sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative likelihood ratios (LR), and diagnostic odds ratio (DOR), with 95% confidence intervals (CI), based on random effects models. The SROC curve analysis and AUC were performed to estimate the overall performance of Raman spectroscopy. QUADAS-2 guidelines were used to evaluate the quality of each study. RESULTS: Nine articles were included according to our inclusion and exclusion criteria. General pooled diagnostic sensitivity and specificity of RS to esophageal cancer were 0.91 (95% CI, 0.89–0.93) and 0.92 (95% CI, 0.91–0.94). The pooled PLR and NLR were 18.98 (95% CI, 6.61–54.49) and 0.09 (95% CI, 0.05–0.16), respectively. The DOR was 217.21 (95% CI, 68.32–690.53) indicating high accuracy. And the AUC of SROC curve was 0.9779. CONCLUSIONS: We found a promisingly high sensitivity and specificity of RS in the diagnosis of suspected esophageal mass.