Chemometric Methods for Non invasive Screening of Oral Cancer from Cyto spectroscopic Information

Abstract

Cancer of the oral cavity currently ranks 16th among the pan-cancer incidence and newlinemortality rate globally. Among the different aetiological factors of oral cancer development newlinetobacco in smoke and smokeless form is considered one of the major risk factors. Although newlinehistopathological examination is the more conventional method of diagnosis in oral pathology, newlineneed for non-invasive, precisive, cost-effective, and easier to operate detection methods is on newlinethe rise since early diagnosis reduces the mortality rate of oral cancer. In this regard, optical newlinediagnostic methods are emerging as potential alternative for conventional examination of oral newlinecancer. Early diagnosis of oral cancer is often plagued by non-visible cellular alterations at newlinemolecular level. These changes in cellular metabolic status, genetic expression and newlinemitochondrial functions are considered as potential discriminator for detection of oral cancer newlinevia optical studies. In this work we hypothesized that these cellular alterations and cancer newlineprogression can be correlated and validated with non-invasive multi-modal studies based on newlinevibration cyto-spectroscopy and chemometric techniques. Observations were made with oral newlineexfoliated epithelial cells obtained from healthy volunteers, habitual cigarette smokers, and newlineclinically diagnosed oral leukoplakia (OLPK) and oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) newlinepatients. We found that ROS accumulation in OSCC patients is accompanied by several newlinechanges including increase in mitochondrial mass, elevated expression of mitochondrial fission newlineprotein (Drp1), and a positive co-relation between the expressions of anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 newlineproteins with mitochondrial fission protein Drp1. Furthermore, higher mitochondrial fission in newlineoral cancer cells was also correlated with the increased expression of cell cycle marker newlineCyclinD1 indicating highly proliferative stage of oral cancer cells. Subsequently, these cellular newlinealterations were positively corelated with the FTIR and Raman cyto-spectroscopic signal of the