Terahertz imaging diagnostics of cancer tissues with a chemometrics technique

Terahertz spectroscopic images of paraffin-embedded cancer tissues have been measured by a terahertz time domain spectrometer. For the systematic identification of cancer tumors, the principal component analysis and the clustering analysis were applied. In three of the four samples, the cancer tissue was recognized as an aggregate of the data points in the principal component plots. By the agglomerative hierarchical clustering, the data points were well categorized into cancer and the other tissues. This method can be also applied to various kinds of automatic discrimination of plural components by terahertz spectroscopic imaging. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics.