Use of Raman spectroscopy to screen diabetes mellitus with machine learning tools

Abstract

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM2) is one of the most widely prevalent diseases worldwide and is currently screened by invasive techniques based on enzymatic assays that measure plasma glucose concentration in a laboratory setting. A promising plan of action for screening DM2 is to identify molecular signatures in a non-invasive fashion. This work describes the application of portable Raman spectroscopy coupled with several supervised machine-learning techniques, to discern between diabetic patients and healthy controls (Ctrl), with a high degree of accuracy. Using artificial neural networks (ANN), we accurately discriminated between DM2 and Ctrl groups with 88.9–90.9% accuracy, depending on the sampling site. In order to compare the ANN performance to more traditional methods used in spectroscopy, principal component analysis (PCA) was carried out. A subset of features from PCA was used to generate a support vector machine (SVM) model, albeit with decreased accuracy (76.0–82.5%). The 10-fold cross-validation model was performed to validate both classifiers. This technique is relatively low-cost, harmless, simple and comfortable for the patient, yielding rapid diagnosis. Furthermore, the performance of the ANN-based method was better than the typical performance of the invasive measurement of capillary blood glucose. These characteristics make our method a promising screening tool for identifying DM2 in a non-invasive and automated fashion.