LAUSR

With cancer seriously hampering the increasing life expectancy of people, developing an instant diagnostic method has become an urgent objective. In this work, we developed a label-free laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) method for high-throughput recognition of tumor cells. LIBS spectra were straightly collected from cells dropped on a silicon substrate and built into a deep learning model for simultaneous classification of various cancers. To interpret the result of the deep learning algorithm, gradient-weighted class activation mapping was utilized to a one-dimensional convolution neural network (1D-CNN), and the saliency maps thus obtained amplified the differences between the spectra of cell lines. Overall results showed that the 1D-CNN algorithms achieved a mean sensitivity of 94.00%, a mean specificity of 98.47%, and a mean accuracy of 97.56%. Thus, the proposed method performed satisfactorily and is seen as an interpretable classification process for cancer cell lines.