Differentiation of healthy and cancerous renal cells using surface-enhanced Raman scattering

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering is used for the differentiation of human kidney adenocarcinoma (ACHN), human kidney carcinoma (A-498) and non-cancerous human kidney embryonic cells (HEK 293). Silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) are used as substrates in the experiments. A volume of colloidal suspension containing AgNPs is added onto the cultured cells on CaF2 slide and the slide is dried at the overturned position. A number of SERS spectra acquired from the three different cell lines are statistically analyzed to differentiate the cells. Principal component analysis (PCA) combined with linear discriminate analysis (LDA) was performed to differentiate the three kidney cell types with a sensitivity and specificity of 88 % and 84 %, respectively. This study demonstrated that SERS could be used to identify renal cancers by combining this new sampling method and LDA algorithms.