Vibrational spectroscopy as a powerful tool for stratifying patients using minimal amounts of blood

In the current aging society, more and more people will suffer from age-related diseases such as cardiovascular diseases or diabetes mellitus. To better diagnose and treat these diseases, individual characterisation of the patients unique condition is needed. Vibrational spectroscopy, including Raman spectroscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), is one of the favourite techniques being developed to enable personalized medicine. Vibrational spectroscopic techniques have the advantages of being non-destructive, rapid, and label-free, can be ultimately performed in high-throughput and provide biochemical fingerprint information on molecular level. Among the samples measured by vibrational spectroscopy, blood is a very popular and important specimen for personalized medicine.