Light scattering and light absorbance separated by extended multiplicative signal correction. Application to near-infrared transmission analysis of powder mixtures

The extended multiplicative signal correction (EMSC) preprocessing method allows a separation of physical light-scattering effects from chemical (vibrational) light absorbance effects in spectra from, for example, powders or turbid solutions. It is here applied to diffuse near infrared transmission (NIT) spectra of mixtures of wheat gluten (protein) and starch (carbohydrate) powders, linearized by conventional log(1/T). Without any correction for uncontrolled light scattering variation between the powder samples, these absorbance spectra could give reasonable predictions of the analyte (gluten), but only when using multivariate calibration with a much more complex model than expected. Standard MSC preprocessing did not work for these data at all; it removed too much analyte information. However, the EMSC preprocessing yielded powder spectra that obeyed Beer's Law more or less as if they had been obtained from transparent liquid solutions, apparently by isolating the chemical light absorption from additive, multiplicative, and wavelength-dependent effects of uncontrolled light-scattering variations. The model-based EMSC and its converse, the extended inverted signal correction (EISC), gave rather complete descriptions of the diffuse absorbance spectra and virtually indistinguishable performance in the calibration set and the test set of samples.