Raman Spectroscopy and Machine Learning for IDH Genotyping of Unprocessed Glioma Biopsies

• Main Authors: Tommaso Sciortino, Riccardo Secoli, Ester d’Amico, Sara Moccia, Marco Conti Nibali, Lorenzo Gay, Marco Rossi, Nicolò Pecco, Antonella Castellano, Elena De Momi, Bethania Fernandes, Marco Riva, Lorenzo Bello
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-08-01
• Series: Cancers
• Subjects: raman spectroscopy; neuro-oncology; classification; glioma; machine learning; isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH)
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6694/13/16/4196

Isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) mutational status is pivotal in the management of gliomas. Patients with IDH-mutated (IDH-MUT) tumors have a better prognosis and benefit more from extended surgical resection than IDH wild-type (IDH-WT). Raman spectroscopy (RS) is a minimally invasive optical technique with great potential for intraoperative diagnosis. We evaluated the RS’s ability to characterize the IDH mutational status onto unprocessed glioma biopsies. We extracted 2073 Raman spectra from thirty-eight unprocessed samples. The classification performance was assessed using the eXtreme Gradient Boosted trees (XGB) and Support Vector Machine with Radial Basis Function kernel (RBF-SVM). Measured Raman spectra displayed differences between IDH-MUT and IDH-WT tumor tissue. From the 103 Raman shifts screened as input features, the cross-validation loop identified 52 shifts with the highest performance in the distinction of the two groups. Raman analysis showed differences in spectral features of lipids, collagen, DNA and cholesterol/phospholipids. We were able to distinguish between IDH-MUT and IDH-WT tumors with an accuracy and precision of 87%. RS is a valuable and accurate tool for characterizing the mutational status of IDH mutation in unprocessed glioma samples. This study improves RS knowledge for future personalized surgical strategy or in situ target therapies for glioma tumors.