Bladder tissue characterization using probe‐based Raman spectroscopy: Evaluation of tissue heterogeneity and influence on the model prediction

Existing approaches for early‐stage bladder tumor diagnosis largely depend on invasive and time‐consuming procedures, resulting in hospitalization, bleeding, bladder perforation, infection and other health risks for the patient. The reduction of current risk factors, while maintaining or even improving the diagnostic precision, is an underlying factor in clinical instrumentation research. For example, for clinic surveillance of patients with a history of noninvasive bladder tumors real‐time tumor diagnosis can enable immediate laser‐based removal of tumors using flexible cystoscopes in the outpatient clinic. Therefore, novel diagnostic modalities are required that can provide real‐time in vivo tumor diagnosis. Raman spectroscopy provides biochemical information of tissue samples ex vivo and in vivo and without the need for complicated sample preparation and staining procedures. For the past decade there has been a rise in applications to diagnose and characterize early cancer in different organs, such as in head and neck, colon and stomach, but also different pathologies, for example, inflammation and atherosclerotic plaques. Bladder pathology has also been studied but only with little attention to aspects that can influence the diagnosis, such as tissue heterogeneity, data preprocessing and model development. The present study presents a clinical investigative study on bladder biopsies to characterize the tumor grading ex vivo, using a compact fiber probe‐based imaging Raman system, as a crucial step towards in vivo Raman endoscopy. Furthermore, this study presents an evaluation of the tissue heterogeneity of highly fluorescent bladder tissues, and the multivariate statistical analysis for discrimination between nontumor tissue, and low‐ and high‐grade tumor. The newly developed Raman‐platform for label‐free characterization of ex vivo bladder tissue enables a comprehensive characterization biopsy samples, that is, differentiation of tumor and nontumor regions, and also the grading of the tumor.