A review of Raman for multicomponent analysis

Raman spectroscopy is a powerful tool for analysing the composition of biological samples in terms of biomolecular content. Over the past two decades there has been considerable interest in the application of Raman to measuring the concentration of the various constituents in a multicomponent mixture. This is achieved by first building a database of the Raman spectra of the individual components in a pure form. Following this a least squares algorithms is applied to find a best fit that accounts for the spectrum of the mixture. The weights returned by a partial least squares algorithm indicate the relative concentration of each component. Of particular interest has been application of the method to estimate the concentration of various analytes in blood and urine samples, including glucose. In this paper we briefly review the subject of multicomponent analysis by Raman Spectroscopy in terms of experimental methodology, limits of measurement, and applications.