Classification of nasopharyngeal cell lines (C666-1, CNE2, NP69) via Raman spectroscopy and decision tree

•Decision tree is firstly introduced to classification of nasopharyngeal cells.•We confirm difference of an intensity ratio between normal and NPC cells.•We find decision tree more appropriate to investigate Raman data sets.

Researchers have demonstrated that Raman spectroscopy can be used for characterization of tumor cells with excellent spatial resolution. However, performance evaluation of different algorithms in classifying multiclass of Raman spectra has not been reported yet. In this work, we present Raman spectra of nasopharyngeal carcinoma and nasopharyngeal normal cell lines. Combined with student’s t-test and several multivariate approaches, including decision tree, support vector classification, and linear discriminant analysis, our work shows that the relative content of two histological abnormality sensitive bands at 1449 and 1658 cm−1 in tumor cells is significantly different from that of normal cells (p = 0.0132), and can be a biomarker to classify these cells. This difference is confirmed by importance analyses in the decision tree model. Furthermore, performances of statistical methods are compared with one another to explore the ability in classification. Results show that the decision tree can be more capable for classification between tumorous and normal cell lines with sensitivity and specificity of 99.0% and 96.9%, respectively. Findings of this work further support our previous work and indicate that the decision tree performs more robustly in cell classification. Our work will prove helpful to the early diagnosis of nasopharyngeal carcinoma, and will indicate the decision tree to be the primary algorithm in tumor-cell classification.