Evaluation of expressed prostatic secretion and serum using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy for the noninvasive detection of prostate cancer, a preliminary study

Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) involving expressed prostatic secretion (EPS) and serum was investigated; the objective was to determine if this approach could distinguish prostate cancer from benign prostatic hyperplasia. A total of 120 SERS spectra for EPS and 96 spectra for serum were gathered from patients within a prospective contemporary biopsy cohort. Significant differences in spectra between prostate cancer and benign prostatic hyperplasia were tentatively assigned to component changes in EPS and serum samples. Principal component analysis and linear discriminate analysis were utilized to evaluate the spectral data for EPS and serum, to build diagnostic algorithms. The leave-one-out cross-validation method was used to validate the diagnostic algorithms; it revealed diagnostic sensitivities of 75% and 60%, specificities of 75% and 76.5%, and accuracies of 75% and 68% for EPS and serum, respectively. The results suggest that EPS and serum SERS analysis could be a potential tool for prostate cancer detection.