Saliva Based Diagnostic Prediction of Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma using FTIR Spectroscopy.

Oral cancer ranks as the sixth most prevalent form of cancer worldwide, presenting a significant public health concern. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), within a 5-year period following diagnosis, the mortality rate among oral cancer patients of all stages stands at 45%. In this study, a total of 60 patients divided into 2 groups were recruited. Group A included 30 histo-pathologically confirmed OSCC patients and Group B included 30 healthy controls. A standardized procedure was followed to collect saliva samples. FTIR spectroscopy was done for all the saliva samples collected from both Group A and B. An IR Prestige-21 (Shimadzu Corp, Japan) spectrometer was used to record IR spectra in the 40-4000 cm range SVM classifier was applied in the classification of disease state from normal subjects using FTIR data. The peaks were identified at wave no 1180 cm, 1230 cm, 1340 cm, 1360 cm, 1420 cm, 1460 cm, 1500 cm, 1540 cm, 1560 cm, and 1637 cm. The observed results of SVM demonstrated the accuracy of 91.66% in the classification of Cancer tissues from the normal subjects with sensitivity of 83.33% while specificity and precision of 100.0%. The development of oral cancer leads to noticeable alterations in the secondary structure of proteins. These findings emphasize the promising use of ATR-FTIR platforms in conjunction with machine learning as a reliable, non-invasive, reagent-free, and highly sensitive method for screening and monitoring individuals with oral cancer.