Analysis of individual red blood cells for Celiac disease diagnosis

Abstract

The field of medical diagnostics has endeavored to explore single species of biomolecules for sensitive and informative disease diagnostic applications. Here, Raman hyperspectroscopy is used to analyze red blood cells for identifying Celiac disease (CD). CD is a common autoimmune disorder which affects approximately 1% of the population. The ingestion of gluten by an individual with CD will result in the body initiating a violent immune response which causes severe damage to the small intestine. If the disease goes undiagnosed, substantial long-term health complications ranging in severity can arise. It is thus crucial to identify the disease as early on as possible to prevent additional problems from manifesting. However, current methods for detecting CD are expensive, invasive, and laborious. It was therefore the goal of this study to develop a better method for diagnosing CD which is noninvasive, inexpensive, accurate and definitive. Raman hyperspectroscopy was used to investigate individual red blood cells from donors with CD and from healthy controls who follow a gluten-free diet. Partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) was used to evaluate the collected Raman spectral data for diagnostic purposes. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was applied to evaluate the performance of the PLS-DA prediction algorithm, resulting in 100% successful external validation of the developed method at the donor level. Raman hyperspectroscopy in combination with chemometric analysis is shown herein to successfully evaluate red blood cells for the accurate detection of CD in a noninvasive, simple, and cost-effective manner.

Keywords: Autoimmune disease; Celiac disease; Chemometrics; Clinical test; Diagnostics; Raman spectroscopy; Red blood cells.