Terahertz identification and quantification of neurotransmitter and neurotrophy mixture

Terahertz spectroscopy has been widely used for investigating the fingerprint spectrum of different substances. For cancerous tissues, the greatest difficulty is the absorption peaks of various substances contained in tissues overlap with each other, which are hard to identify and quantitative analyze. As a result, it is very hard to measure the presence of cancer cell and then to diagnose accurately. In this paper, we select three typical neurotransmitters (gamma-aminobutyric acid, L-glutamic acid, dopamine hydrochloride) and two typical metabolites (inositol and creatine) in neurons to measure their terahertz spectra with different mixture ratios. By choosing characteristic absorption peaks, removing baseline and using the least square method, we can identify the components and proportions of each mixture, where the goodness of fit to practical situation is up to 94%. These results provide important evidences for identifying nerve substances and obtaining exact quantitative analysis. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America