Quantitative determination of aflatoxin B1 concentration in acetonitrile by chemometric methods using terahertz spectroscopy

• Aflatoxins are carcinogenic, and present serious risks to agricultural products.
• Conventional methods of detection are both time-consuming and complex.
• We use terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) to detect Aflatoxins.
• Different regression techniques are optimal for different concentrations.
• Detection using THz-TDS is successful, and also much simpler than other techniques.

Aflatoxins contaminate and colonize agricultural products, such as grain, and thereby potentially cause human liver carcinoma. Detection via conventional methods has proven to be time-consuming and complex. In this paper, the terahertz (THz) spectra of aflatoxin B1 in acetonitrile solutions with concentration ranges of 1–50 μg/ml and 1–50 μg/l are obtained and analyzed for the frequency range of 0.4–1.6 THz. Linear and nonlinear regression models are constructed to relate the absorption spectra and the concentrations of 160 samples using the partial least squares (PLS), principal component regression (PCR), support vector machine (SVM), and PCA-SVM methods. Our results indicate that PLS and PCR models are more accurate for the concentration range of 1–50 μg/ml, whereas SVM and PCA-SVM are more accurate for the concentration range of 1–50 μg/l. Furthermore, ten unknown concentration samples extracted from mildewed maize are analyzed quantitatively using these methods.