Multivariate feature analysis of early-stage laryngeal cancer serum components using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy

Laryngeal cancer is a common head-and-neck malignant tumor with geographically variable incidence. Its lack of specific early clinical symptoms often causes missed diagnosis, leading to most cases being identified at intermediate/advanced stages and thus poor treatment efficacy and prognosis. Early, accurate screening for high-risk populations is therefore critical to improving survival. This study systematically investigates the clinical application value of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) combined with deep learning models for serum screening in early laryngeal cancer. It specifically examines the discriminative performance of one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) models, including CNN-attention with a fused attention mechanism and CNN-baseline without an attention mechanism, and compares these with traditional machine learning models.Serum samples were collected from three groups: Early laryngeal cancer, vocal fold polyps, and healthy controls. SERS was used to obtain serum molecular vibration fingerprint spectra. After spectral preprocessing, five models (CNN-attention, CNN-baseline, SVM, AdaBoost, KNN) were established to discriminate the three groups and compare performance. Leave-one-patient-out cross-validation (LOPO-CV) results indicate that the CNN-attention and CNN-baseline models significantly outperform other models in discrimination efficacy. Specifically, the CNN-attention model achieves a patient-level accuracy of 89.33%, while the CNN-baseline model reaches 88.67%. SVM, KNN, and AdaBoost had inferior performance. This study confirms that serum SERS-based 1D-CNN provides an efficient, accurate method for early laryngeal cancer screening, laying a foundation for clinical translation and offering new technical support for early screening • SERS with deep learning enables non-invasive early laryngeal cancer detection. • Serum spectra from 150 subjects were analyzed using five different ML models. • 1D-CNN significantly outperformed SVM, KNN, and AdaBoost classifiers. • Ablation study assesses the impact of attention on SERS diagnostic performance. • This method offers a promising, accurate tool for early clinical screening.