FTIR spectroscopy as a point of care diagnostic tool for diabetes and periodontitis: A saliva analysis approach

Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a general term for heterogeneous metabolic disorders whose main characteristic is chronic hyperglycemia. Considering that conventional diagnostic methods are currently unable of early DM detection and the number of diabetic patients has been increasing worldwide, there is a clinical need for novel diagnostic approaches. Fourier-transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy technique an alternative non-invasive diagnostic method for real-time evaluation of biofluids such as saliva. This study aims evaluate the feasibility of diagnosing diabetes and periodontitis through saliva samples based on their FT-IR spectra. Our first collection and spectral analysis of samples was a pilot study and comprised a total of 23 patients, 2 healthy, 9 with diabetes and 12 with diabetes and periodontitis. By using weighted KNN as classifier, we have obtained an area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve of 0.92 and 0.95 when considering the diabetes or diabetes + periodontitis groups as positive groups, respectively.