Label-free screening of intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma cells using electroporation assisted surface-enhanced Raman scattering combined with statistical algorithms

Abstract

Analysis of biochemical components in living cells is essential for early screening of intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC). In this paper, we investigated the feasibility of using electroporation assisted surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy and multivariate analysis methods to discriminate ICC cells (HCCC-9810 cell line) from normal liver cells (Lo2 cell line) with the aim to develop a label-free and fast method for ICC cell screening. Electroporation technology was employed to deliver silver nanoparticles into living cells and then high quality SERS spectra were successfully measured from 100 ICC cells and 100 normal liver cells. There were significant differences in SERS spectra between ICC cells and normal cells, which indicated special changes in the content of biomolecules including nucleic acids, proteins and lipid in different cell lines. Based on the principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) algorithms, high diagnostic sensitivity (97%), specificity (96%) and accuracy (96.5%) were achieved for distinguishing ICC cells and normal cells. This exploratory work demonstrates that the electroporation-assisted SERS technique combined with PCA-LDA diagnostic algorithms has great potential for detecting and screening of cancer cell.