Identification of Colorectal Cancer Using Near-Infrared Spectroscopy and Adaboost with Decision Stump

Rapid and objective detection of cancer is crucial for successful treatment. Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is a vibrational technique capable of optically probing molecular changes associated with disease. The purpose of this study was to explore NIR spectroscopy for discriminating cancer from normal colorectal tissues. A total of 110 tissue samples from patients who underwent operations were characterized in this study. The popular ensemble technique AdaBoost was used to construct the diagnostic model. A decision stump was used as the weak learning algorithm. Adaboost with decision stump, an ensemble of weak classifiers, was compared with the most suitable single model, a strong classifier. Only the 20 most significant variables were selected as inputs for the model based on measured defined variable importance. Using an independent test set, the single strong classifier provided diagnostic accuracy of 89.1%, sensitivity of 100%, and specificity of 78.6%, whereas the ensemble of weak stumps provided accuracy of 96.3%, sensitivity of 96.3%, and specificity of 96.3% for distinguishing cancer from normal colorectal tissues. Therefore, NIR spectroscopy in combination with AdaBoost with decision stumps has demonstrated potential for rapid and objective diagnosis of colorectal cancer.