A hierarchical classifier based on human blood plasma fluorescence for non-invasive colorectal cancer screening.

•A hierarchical classification method based on plasma fluorescence to identify colorectal cancer.•A unified approach that expands CRC identification to other non-malignant findings.•SVM-RFE is used to deal with high dimensionality and select discriminatory features.•Superior results achieved for CRC classification (sensitivity of 0.86 and specificity of 0.95).•The classification of non-malignant conditions achieved sensitivity of 0.60 and specificity of 0.79.