Fast discrimination of tumor and blood cells by label-free surface-enhanced Raman scattering spectra and deep learning

Rapidly and accurately identifying tumor cells and blood cells is an important part of circulating tumor cell detection. Raman spectroscopy is a molecular vibrational spectroscopy technique that can provide fingerprint information about molecular vibrational and rotational energy levels. Deep learning is an advanced machine learning method that can be used to classify various data accurately. In this paper, the surface-enhanced Raman scattering spectra of blood cells and various tumor cells are measured with the silver film substrate. It is found that there are significant differences in nucleic acid-related characteristic peaks between most tumor cells and blood cells. These spectra are classified by the feature peak ratio method, principal component analysis combined with K-nearest neighbor, and residual network, which is a kind of deep learning algorithm. The results show that the ratio method and principal component analysis combined with the K-nearest neighbor method could only distinguish some tumor cells from blood cells. The residual network can quickly identify various tumor cells and blood cells with an accuracy of 100%, and there is no complex preprocessing for the surface-enhanced Raman scattering spectra. This study shows that the silver film surface-enhanced Raman scattering technology combined with deep learning algorithms can quickly and accurately identify blood cells and tumor cells, indicating an important reference value for the label-free detecting circulating tumor cells.