Raman microscopy of cells: Chemical imaging of apoptosis

Singular value decomposition was applied to the set of the non-resonant Raman spectra, recorded during Raman imaging of the single apoptotic cell. The basis vectors and the corresponding singular values were assessed in terms of their statistical significance. The noise-containing basis vectors were rejected while keeping the meaningful ones. In this way the Raman images of the apoptotic cell were successfully reconstructed from the spectrally-filtered data matrix. The results are demonstrated on the spatial distribution of the DNA, protein and phospholipids, present in the fragments of the apoptotic cell.