Label-free detection of liver cancer based on silver nanoparticles coated tissue surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy

Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) was employed to obtain hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) tissue spectra with coated silver nanoparticles. Principal component analysis (PCA) combined with linear discriminate analysis (LDA) was introduced to analyze the obtained spectra. The sensitivity and specificity of discrimination for HCC and normal group is 93.8% and 100%. While that is 79.2% and 93.8% for HCC and adjacent HCC group, this study suggests a great potential method for early HCC detection by combination of silver nanoparticles based tissue SERS and PCA-LDA analysis.