Research from the Guangdong Medical College in China has suggested that a laser-based cancer test may provide a breakthrough in prostate cancer screening (Li S, Zhang Y, Xu J, et al. Noninvasive prostate cancer screening based on serum surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy and support vector machine. Applied Physics Letters. 2014).
Taking two techniques and combining them produced a test with 98.1% accuracy and said to be ‘a far cry from the relative guesswork of PSA tests’. The two tests were an existing spectroscopy technique called surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) and a new analysis technique called support vector machine (SVM).
Traditional PSA tests give a large level of over-diagnosis. But the real game changer recently was when the American Preventative Task Force actually warned in 2014 against the use of PSA tests!