Discrimination of soft tissues using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy in combination with k nearest neighbors (kNN) and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers

•LIBS plus multivariate analysis is used for discrimination of fresh soft tissues.•PCA, kNN and SVM classifiers are used to build discrimination models.•Fat, skin and muscle tissues can be discriminated with excellent performances.•Highly similar muscle tissues can be discriminated with acceptable performances.•LIBS could be used for diagnosis of tissues suffering early lesions and abnormalities.