Dry film method with ytterbium as the internal standard for near infrared spectroscopic plasma glucose assay coupled with boosting support vector regression

A novel near infrared (NIR) spectroscopic measurement technique, dry film method, has been proposed for the determination of glucose in plasma. Rare earth element ytterbium (Yb) has been taken in the dry film method as the internal standard to compensate for the thickness variation of the dry films. This technique circumvents the interference from water absorption and requires only 50 µl of sample. Support vector regression (SVR) as a multivariate calibration method has been combined with boosting for the development of a boosting support vector regression (BSVR) method for the dry film measurement modeling. The introduction of boosting drastically enhances the performance of individual SVR model. The results show that the glucose in plasma can be determined over the 0.4–20 mmol/L concentration range with satisfactory accuracy using the dry film technique coupled with the BSVR method. Moreover, the performance of BSVR was compared favorably with that of the conventional SVR and PLS.