Pattern recognition of Inductively Coupled Plasma Atomic Emission Spectroscopy of human scalp hair for discriminating between healthy and Hepatitis C patients

Inductively Coupled Plasma Atomic Emission Spectroscopy measurements of six trace elements were performed on the scalp hair of 155 donors, 73 of which have been diagnosed with Hepatitis C and 82 Controls. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) was employed to visualise the separation between groups and show the relationship between the elements and the diseased state. Pattern recognition methods for classification involving Quadratic Discriminant Analysis and Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) were applied to the data. The number of significant components for both PCA and PLS were determined using the bootstrap. The stability of training set models were determined by repeatedly splitting the data into training and test sets and employing visualisation for two components models: the percent classification ability (CC), predictive ability (PA) and model stability (MS) were computed for test and training sets.