Abstract

Prostate cancer is now the most commonly diagnosed male cancer in Europe. Histopathology, the current gold standard for diagnosing prostate pathology is subjective and limited by intra and inter-observer variation. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) enables objective tissue analysis on the basis of biochemical and structural tissue components. This study examined FTIR’s ability to discriminate between benign, premalignant and malignant prostate pathologies. Biochemical fitting using non negative least squares was performed on the spectral datasets of individual prostate pathologies. This novel technique was applied to estimate the relative concentrations of the dominant components in prostate tissue from different prostate pathologies. Preliminary results of the biochemical fitting were promising and gave an early insight into possible biomarkers which could be used in the future to classify stages of the carcinogenesis process. The Principal Component Analysis fed Linear Discriminant Analysis enabled good separation of the pathologies with sensitivities and specificities comparable with the gold standard histopathology. Further work will develop the biochemical fitting technique and increase sample size.

© 2007 SPIE