BackgroundEarly screening and detection of lung cancer is essential for the diagnosis and prognosis of the disease. In this paper, we investigated the feasibility of serum Raman spectroscopy for rapid lung cancer screening.MethodsRaman spectra were collected from 45 patients with lung cancer, 45 with benign lung lesions, and 45 healthy volunteers. And then the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm was applied to build a diagnostic model for lung cancer. Furthermore, 15 independent individuals were sampled for external validation, including 5 lung cancer patients, 5 benign lung lesion patients, and 5 healthy controls.ResultsThe diagnostic sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy were 91.67%, 92.22%, 90.56% (lung cancer vs. healthy control), 92.22%,95.56%,93.33% (benign lung lesion vs. healthy) and 80.00%, 83.33%, 80.83% (lung cancer vs. benign lung lesion), repectively. In the independent validation cohort, our model showed that all the samples were classified correctly.ConclusionTherefore, this study demonstrates that the serum Raman spectroscopy analysis technique combined with the SVM algorithm has great potential for the noninvasive detection of lung cancer.