Preliminary study on discrimination of healthy and osteoarthritic articular cartilage of canine by hollow fiber attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and Fisher's discriminant analysis

Submillimetric hollow fiber (HOF-) attenuated total reflection (ATR-) Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIRS) technique is very suitable for in situ detection of biological samples. HOF-ATR-FTIRS analysis discloses that the significant changes in collagen fiber and proteoglycan between healthy and osteoarthritic (OA) canine specimens. The technique combined with principal component analysis (PCA) and Fisher's discriminant analysis (FDA) was used to further identify in situ healthy and OA cartilage specimens. The sensitivity of 100% and specificity of 93.6% were obtained for prediction group after all the cases were correctly identified for initial sample, and cross validation was identified with 100% accuracy. The HOF-ATR-FTIRS technique is convenient for operation and suitable for micro-area in situ diagnosis, while the FDA method is fast and accurate. The combination of HOF-ATR-FTIR technique and FDA method can fast realize the micro-area detection and classification of in situ samples with good accuracy, which has potential ability to provide a practical clinical diagnosis of OA.