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Raman spectroscopy for screening and diagnosis of cervical cancer

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Abstract

Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women worldwide and mainly affects younger women. The mortality associated with cervical cancer can be reduced if the disease is detected at the pre-cancer stage. Current best-practice methods include cytopathology, HPV testing, and histopathology, but these methods are limited in terms of subjectivity, cost, and time. There is an unmet clinical need for new methods to aid clinicians in the early detection of cervical pre-cancer. These methods should be objective and rapid and require minimal sample preparation. Raman spectroscopy is a vibrational spectroscopic technique by which incident radiation is used to induce vibrations in the molecules of a sample and the scattered radiation may be used to characterise the sample in a rapid and non-destructive manner. Raman spectroscopy is sensitive to subtle biochemical changes occurring at the molecular level, enabling spectral variations corresponding to disease onset to be detected. Over the past 15 years, there have been numerous reports revealing the potential of Raman spectroscopy together with multivariate statistical analysis for the detection of a variety of cancers. This paper discusses the recent advances and challenges for cervical-cancer screening and diagnosis and offers some perspectives for the future.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge funding from Enterprise Ireland co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and Ireland’s EU Structural Funds Programme 2007–2013, CF2011 1045, the Health Research Board Collaborative Applied Research Grant, CARG2012/29, and Dublin Institute of Technology Fiosraigh Research Excellence Award.

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Author notes

  1. Franck Bonnier

    Present address: Faculty of Pharmacy, EA 6295 Nanomédicaments et Nanosondes, Université François-Rabelais de Tours, 31 Avenue Monge, 37200, Tours, France

Authors and Affiliations

  1. DIT Centre for Radiation and Environmental Science, FOCAS Research Institute, Dublin Institute of Technology, Kevin St, Dublin 8, Ireland

    Fiona M. Lyng, Damien Traynor & Inês R. M. Ramos

  2. School of Physics, Dublin Institute of Technology, Kevin St, Dublin 8, Ireland

    Fiona M. Lyng, Damien Traynor & Inês R. M. Ramos

  3. FOCAS Research Institute, Dublin Institute of Technology, Kevin St, Dublin 8, Ireland

    Franck Bonnier & Hugh J. Byrne

Authors
  1. Fiona M. Lyng
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  2. Damien Traynor
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  3. Inês R. M. Ramos
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  4. Franck Bonnier
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  5. Hugh J. Byrne
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fiona M. Lyng.

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Published in the topical collection Raman4Clinics with guest editors Jürgen Popp and Christoph Krafft.

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Lyng, F.M., Traynor, D., Ramos, I.R.M. et al. Raman spectroscopy for screening and diagnosis of cervical cancer. Anal Bioanal Chem 407, 8279–8289 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00216-015-8946-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00216-015-8946-1

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