Rapid Biomarker Screening of Alzheimer's Disease by Machine Learning and Graphene-Assisted Raman Spectroscopy

As the most common cause of dementia, Alzheimer9s disease (AD) faces challenges in terms of understanding of pathogenesis, developing early diagnosis and developing effective treatment. Rapid and accurate identification of AD biomarkers in the brain will be critical to provide novel insights of AD. To this end, in the current work, we developed a system that can enable a rapid screening of AD biomarkers by employing Raman spectroscopy and machine learning analyses in AD transgenic animal brains. Specifically, we collected Raman spectra on slices of mouse brains with and without AD, and used machine learning to classify AD and non-AD spectra. By contacting monolayer graphene with the brain slices, we achieved significantly increased accuracy from 77% to 98% in machine learning classification. Further, we identified the Raman signature bands that are most important in classifying AD and non-AD samples. Based on these, we managed to identify AD-related biomolecules, which have been confirmed by biochemical studies. Our Raman-machine learning integrated method is promising to greatly accelerate the study of AD and can be potentially extended to human samples and various other diseases.