Optical measurement of glucose concentrations using Raman spectroscopy

The need for devising a method to noninvasively measure the glucose concentration in the body is great because of the application to improving blood sugar control in diabetics as to improve the quality and longevity of life. The noninvasive method studied in this paper is to use an optical measurement of a glucose solution to predict the actual glucose concentration of that solution by means of spontaneous Raman Spectroscopy using multivariate regression analysis. Although this method has been studied by many groups of researchers, the advantage comes with a small, compact, relatively inexpensive, and low intensity system that could be more easily implemented into a practical device that could be used for clinical and patient self monitoring. These advantages over previous studies include reduced incident laser power, at 60 mW, and reduced integration times, with a significant signal to noise ratio at physiological concentrations. The results of the study showed a significant correlation between the predictor variable, optical measure of glucose concentration, to the outcome variable, actual glucose concentration, with a correlation coefficient of 0.99987, an F(2, 2) statistic of 7599, and a p-value of 13*10/sup -4/.