Discrimination of Osteonecrosis and Normal Tissues by Near-Infrared Spectroscopy and Successive Projections Algorithm-Linear Discriminant Analysis

Osteonecrosis of femoral head (ONFH) is a disease characterized by an impaired blood flow in the bone. The pathogenesis is still unknown, which makes an exact diagnosis troublesome and heavily dependent on experience. Exploring the information of molecular level by modern spectroscopy may help to discover the underlying pathogenesis and find its diagnostic application in clinical medicine. The study focuses on the combination of near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and classification models for discriminating ONFH and normal tissues. A total of 128 surgical specimens was prepared and NIR spectra were recorded by an integrating sphere. The experiment data set was divided into three subsets, i.e., the training set, validation set, and test set. Successive projection algorithm-linear discriminant analysis (SPA-LDA) was used to compress variables and build the diagnostic model. Partial least square-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) was used as the reference. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used for exploratory analysis. The results showed that compared to PLS-DA, SPA-LDA provided a more parsimonious model using only seven variables and achieved better performance, i.e., sensitivity of 90.5 and 85%, and specificity of 100 and 95.5% for the validation and test sets, respectively. It indicated that NIR spectroscopy combined with SPA-LDA algorithm was a feasible aid tool for discriminating ONFH from normal tissue.