Non-gated laser induced breakdown spectroscopy provides a powerful segmentation tool on concomitant treatment of characteristic and continuum emission.

We demonstrate the application of non-gated laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) for characterization and classification of organic materials with similar chemical composition. While use of such a system introduces substantive continuum background in the spectral dataset, we show that appropriate treatment of the continuum and characteristic emission results in accurate discrimination of pharmaceutical formulations of similar stoichiometry. Specifically, our results suggest that near-perfect classification can be obtained by employing suitable multivariate analysis on the acquired spectra, without prior removal of the continuum background. Indeed, we conjecture that pre-processing in the form of background removal may introduce spurious features in the signal. Our findings in this report significantly advance the prior results in time-integrated LIBS application and suggest the possibility of a portable, non-gated LIBS system as a process analytical tool, given its simple instrumentation needs, real-time capability and lack of sample preparation requirements.