In the field of Raman spectroscopy (RS), particularly when working with biologi-cal samples, identifying the chemical compounds most involved in specific pathologies is of critical importance for pathologists. The correlation between chemical substances present in biological tissue and pathology can contribute not only to a deeper understanding of the disease itself but also to the development of novel artificial intelligence-based diagnostic methodologies. Motivated by these clinical challenges, we propose a method to identify the most discriminative spectral bands by leveraging the synergy between Topological Machine Learning (TML) and Raman Spectroscopy. The intrinsic explainability of part of the TML pipeline can indeed play a key role in the detection of such spectral bands, e.g. the proteins most associated with the disease. In order to evaluate the performance of our method, we apply it to three case studies: the RS of biological tissue related to the chondrogenic bone tumors, the RS of cerebrospinal fluid associated with Alzheimer’s disease and the RS of pancreatic tissue. The results obtained with our method are promising in pinpointing which spectral bands are most relevant for diagnosis, but they also highlight the need for further investigation.
                    Previous Article in event
            
                            
    
                    Next Article in event
            
                            Next Article in session
            
                    
                                                    
        
                    Topological Machine Learning for Discriminative Spectral Band Identification in Raman Spectroscopy of Pathological Samples
                
                                    
                
                
                    Published:
29 August 2025
by MDPI
in The 18th Advanced Infrared Technology and Applications (AITA2025)
session Session 5 (Under 35)
                
                
                
                    Abstract: 
                                    
                        Keywords: Raman, Machine Learning, Topological Data Analysis, Explainable Artificial Intelligence
                    
                
                
                
                 
         
            
 
        
    
    
         
    
    
         
    
    
         
    
    
         
    
