Recently, it has been demonstrated that Raman spectroscopy can play a fundamental role in assisting the work of the anatomopathologist by allowing classification of oncological samples with practically 100% accuracy in oncological diagnosis. Raman spectroscopy consists in illuminating the tissues under analysis with a laser and collecting the radiation diffused by the molecular vibrations from the samples. This gives the possibility to have a molecular fingerprint of the tissues under analysis and, so, allowing to identify specific biomolecules in healthy or sick tissues. In turn, the degree of malignancy of oncological samples can be carefully characterized. Based on the current state of the art of Raman spectroscopy technology level, our technological proposal concerns: 1) the development of a software based on Artificial Intelligence algorithms to be applied to data processing to classify the tissues under analysis; 2) improvement and customization of instrumentation for anatomopathology laboratories; 3) relatively to melanoma cancer, the development of customized instrumentation for the screening of nevi in large sections of the population.
The proposed innovation can be subdivided into three points listed in order of impact: 1) the development of a software based on AI techniques for data processing of datasets generated during the application of Raman spectroscopy to oncological samples. The software allows to classify and diagnose the oncological tissues under analysis giving the possibility to perform diagnoses with 100% accuracy. This software can be applied to the diagnosis of any type of tumor. When applied to melanoma, Raman spectroscopy instrumentation can be customized to perform fast and reliable screening of the population, and this ability stimulates the second impact of the proposed innovation: 2) customization of the instrumentation related to Raman spectroscopy for screening of nevi of large population in outdoor conditions (pharmacies, etc). The third point, 3) is the customization of the Raman spectroscopy instrumentation to be used in the histology and anatomopathology laboratories with dedicated technical staff. Steps 2 and 3 use the software developed in step 1.