Differentiation of latex biomembrane with collagen and non-collagen using laser induced breakdown spectroscopy

Studies on the interaction of a biomaterial with other components are important to enhance its positive effects and resolve its limitations. Therefore, the search for fast and low-cost techniques is essential for the analysis, characterization and differentiation of these biomaterials. Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a multielemental, fast, with reduced analytical cost and environmentally clean technique that does not require the use of reagents for sample preparation. In this work, an elemental characterization of collagen and non-collagen latex samples was performed by LIBS technique. Multivariate analyzes, such as principal component analysis (PCA) and machine learning (ML) algorithms were applied on LIBS data in order to differentiate the classes. The main elements detected in the LIBS spectra examined were due to C, Fe, Mg, Ca, Na, H, N and K. The best results were achieved using LIBS spectral data from the specific range: 656.15–656.55 nm combined with 744.08–744.48 nm. The elements H and N were identified as the main discriminating factors between the samples studied. The leave one out cross-validation tests indicates that collagen latex biomembrane can be differentiated from non-collagen samples with 94.44% accuracy using the Weighted K-Nearest Neighbor algorithm.