Raman spectroscopy as a novel method in placental research: Recognizing the pattern of placental hypoxia

Raman spectroscopy (RS) is a nonelastic photon scattering technique. We evaluated whether a specific RS pattern exists in fetal venous perfusates obtained at 30- to 60-min intervals from the ex vivo human dual placental perfusion model under hypoxic (n = 6) and normoxic (n = 5) conditions. A stratified principle component and a linear support vector machine analyses showed that the separation between 2 conditions was readily feasible at 60–120 min of perfusion; after this, any apparent differences were most likely the result of artifact overfitting. This report is the first attempt to identify the RS fingerprint associated with placental hypoxia.