Abstract:
Excessive protein excretion in human urine is an early and sensitive marker of diabetic nephropathy, primary and
secondary renal disease. Kidney problems, particularly chronic kidney disease, remain among the few growing
causes of mortality in the world. Therefore, it is important to develop efficient, expressive, and low-cost method
for protein determination. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) methods are potential candidates to
achieve those criteria. In this paper, the SERS method was developed to distinguish patients with proteinuria and
the healthy group. Two types of commercial gold nanoparticles with a diameter of 60 nm and 100 nm were
employed to prepare substrates for the analysis of 78 samples of unique patients. Data analysis by the PCA-LDA
algorithm, and the ROC curves, gave results for diagnostic figures of merits. Sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and
AUC were 0.79, 0.89, 0.85, and 0.90 for the set with 60 nm Au NPs, respectively. Sensitivity, specificity, accuracy,
and AUC were 0.79, 0.98, 0.90, and 0.91 for the set with 100 nm Au NPs, respectively. The results show
the potential of SERS spectroscopy in differentiating between patients with proteinuria and healthy individuals
for clinical diagnostics.