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⁻¹ 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⁻¹, 1230 cm⁻¹, 1340 cm⁻¹, 1360 cm⁻¹, 1420 cm⁻¹, 1460 cm⁻¹, 1500 cm⁻¹, 1540 cm⁻¹, 1560 cm⁻¹, and 1637 cm⁻¹. 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.