Non Invasive Tool to Diagnose Endometriosis

British scientists have used infrared spectroscopy to identify biochemical differences between endometrial tissue growing outside the uterus (ectopic) and the endometrial tissue of the uterus (eutopic). They also compared the results with tissue from endometriosis-free women (benign eutopic).

They used attenuated total reflection Fourier-transform IR (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy or transmission FTIR microspectroscopy for spectral acquisition, coupled with principal component analysis (PCA)-linear discriminant analysis (LDA) for chemometric analysis.

They found that there was a clear segregation between the three categories, with a marked difference between eutopic endometrial tissue from patients with or without endometriosis.  This indicates that IR spectroscopy coupled with multivariate analysis may provide a non-invasive diagnostic tool for endometriosis.

Original publication:

K T Cheung et al, Analyst, 2011