Characterization of radix rehmanniae processing procedure using FT-IR spectroscopy through nonnegative independent component analysis.

A method is proposed for monitoring the radix rehmanniae proparate processing procedure and determining the endpoint of the process using attenuated total reflectance (ATR) FT-IR through nonnegative independent component analysis (ICA). In the proposed method, ATR FT-IR spectra of the samples were firstly measured at different steaming periods. Then, nonnegative ICA was used for direct estimation of the feature spectra of the pure components in the mixture without pre-separation and other prior information.