Development of diagnostic models for canine osteoarthritis based on serum and joint fluid mid-infrared spectral data using five different discrimination and classification methods

Osteoarthritis (OA) is an insidious joint disease that gradually leads to cartilage loss and the morphological impairment of other joint tissues. Therefore, early diagnosis and timely therapeutic intervention are of importance. Although there are a few diagnostic techniques used in clinics, these methods have various drawbacks. Infrared spectroscopy has emerged as an important analytical technique with wide applications in a variety of areas including clinical diagnosis. Research has shown that the presence of OA is associated with biochemical changes that are presumed to be reflected in serum or joint fluid. Hence, OA may be detected provided that serum or joint fluid is measured by infrared spectroscopy and appropriate data analysis methods are used to extract the diagnostic information from the infrared spectra. In this work, 5 discrimination and classification methods ([1] principal component analysis coupled with linear discriminant analysis, [2] principal component analysis coupled with multiple logistic regression, [3] partial least squares discriminant analysis, [4] regularized linear discriminant analysis, and [5] support vector machine) were used to build OA diagnostic models based on mid-infrared spectra of serum and joint fluid. Useful diagnostic models were developed, indicating that infrared spectroscopy coupled with multivariate data analysis methods is very promising as a simple and accurate approach for OA diagnosis. The results also showed that models built from the 5 methods were different, as were the models' predictive performances. Therefore, choice of appropriate data analysis methods in model development should be taken into account.