Rapid quantification of phenolic acids in Radix Salvia Miltrorrhiza extract solutions by FT-NIR spectroscopy in transflective mode

A rapid method for simultaneous determination of main phenolic acids in Radix Salvia Miltrorrhiza extract solutions was developed using Fourier transform near infrared spectroscopy in transflective mode and multivariate calibration and HPLC-UV as the reference method. Partial least squares (PLS) algorithm was conducted on the calibration of regression models. The multiplicative scatter correction, Norris derivative and second derivative were adopted for the spectral pre-processing, and the number of PLS factors were optimized by leave-one-out cross-validation. The performance of the final model was evaluated according to root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) and correlation coefficient (R). The R values achieved in the prediction set were above 0.93. The developed models were used for analysis of unknown samples and routine monitoring with satisfactory results. This work demonstrated that NIR spectroscopy combined with PLS algorithm could be used for the rapid determination of the main phenolic acids of Salvia Miltrorrhiza extract solutions.