Raman spectroscopy as noninvasive method of diagnosis of pediatric onset inflammatory bowel disease

We propose here a spectroscopic method to diagnose and differentiate inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), such as ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn’s disease (CD) with pediatric onset, in a complete noninvasive way without performing any duodenal biopsy. In particular, the Raman technique was applied to proteic extract from fecal samples in order to achieve information about molecular vibrations that can potentially furnish spectral signatures of cellular modifications occurring as a consequence of specific pathologic conditions. The attention was focused on the investigation of the amide I region, quantitatively accounting the spectral changes in the secondary structures by applying deconvolution and curve-fitting. Inflammation is found to give rise to a significant increasing of the nonreducible (trivalent)/reducible (divalent) cross-linking ratio R of the protein network. This parameter revealed an excellent marker in order to distinguish IBD subjects from non-IBD ones, and, among IBD patients, to differentiate between UC and CD. The proposed methodology was validated by statistical analysis using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve.