Characterization of radix rehmanniae processing procedure using FT-IR spectroscopy through nonnegative independent component analysis.

A method is proposed for monitoring the radix rehmanniae proparate processing procedure and determining the endpoint of the process using attenuated total reflectance (ATR) FT-IR through nonnegative independent component analysis (ICA). In the proposed method, ATR FT-IR spectra of the samples were firstly measured at different steaming periods. Then, nonnegative ICA was used for direct estimation of the feature spectra of the pure components in the mixture without pre-separation and other prior information. The estimated independent components (ICs) and their variation of the relative concentrations were used to characterize the processing procedure and determine the endpoint. The results show that the estimated three ICs are consistent with that of the chemical components in the mixtures, i.e. catalpol/rehmaionoside, glucose, and other compounds that nearly keep invariant during the processing procedure. The endpoint determined by the IR-ICA method is 15 h, which was located in the range obtained by expert sensory analysis, whereas the endpoint determined by the traditional sensory analysis is 14-17 h and even 14-20 h, which showed the significant deviation of the endpoints determined by different operators.