The clinical transferability of Raman micro-spectroscopic systems for cervical cytopathology

The clinical potential for Raman microscopic systems is well established for early diagnosis via cytology. Although Raman systems offer a complementary diagnostic tool providing molecular information, it is not yet utilised substantially in clinics. A few challenges for the clinical implementation of Raman spectroscopy are system and user variability. In this study, we asked how much variability occurs due to different Raman systems or users. To address these questions, we measured the same set of cells using two different Raman microscopes and by two different users. And classification models were generated using multivariate partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) and analysed for clinical implementation. Raman spectra were measured from single exfoliated cells (n=400) from ThinPrep samples with negative cytology (n=10) and high-grade cytology (n=10). Raman spectra were acquired from the same set of cells via two identical HORIBA Jobin Yvon XploRA^TM systems (Villeneuve d'Ascq, France), as well as two different users. The Raman data was subjected to PLS-DA and cross-validated via leave-one-patient out. The study's findings suggest that the data acquired from the two Raman systems are 99% identical. However, the observed classification accuracy for the data obtained by user-1 was 92%, whereas by user-2 was 99%.