Detection and analysis of glucose at metabolic concentration using Raman spectroscopy

Frequent measurement of blood glucose is very important for diabetic patients in managing the disease and reducing the more severe complications associated. Therefore, a non-invasive method for determining the glucose level in blood would provide benefits to millions of diabetics. An optical non-invasive technique, acquisition of Raman spectrum of the glucose from the aqueous humor of eye, has been studied in this paper. With the advantage of this technique, it is possible to individually identify every metabolite in aqueous humor including glucose and glucose molecules down to 0,1 wt %, which is the actual concentration of glucose in aqueous humor in presence of other metabolites, can be quantitatively identified. The measurement system used in this study is compact, relatively inexpensive and employs a reduced incident laser power compared to the systems used in similar studies. In data analysis part of the study, in order to overcome the major problem of signal to noise ratio in determining low quantities of metabolites using Raman technique, a smoothing operation was applied. In the results, it has been shown that using a smoothing function called the Savitzky-Golay filter, a significant improvement in signal to noise ratio of data at 0,1 wt % is obtained.