The Application of Raman Spectroscopy in Cancer Diagnosis

Cancer is one of the serious diseases that threaten people's health and life.The early diagnosis and timely treatment is the most effective method to increase the cancer patients' surviving probability.As a noninvasive detection method,laser Raman spectroscopy can nondestructively provide abundant information about molecular structures and compositions,which can indicate the structural variations between cancerous tissues and normal ones at molecular level.So Raman spectroscopy can be applied to diagnose cancers at the early stage.Compared with the traditional medical methods applied to diagnose cancers,Raman spectroscopy possesses many merits such as nondestructive,noninvasive,high resolution,no need for sample preparation and high automation.This article reviewed the study on the applications of Raman spectroscopy in the diagnosis of skin cancer,nasopharyngeal carcinoma,lung cancer,gastric cancer,colon carcinoma,breast cancer and prostatic carcinoma.and it also predicted the further application of Raman spectroscopy in the cancer diagnosis field,which can provide a reference basis for the research on the early detection and diagnosis in cancers.