Nondestructive detection of triclosan in antibacterial hand soaps using digitally labelled Raman spectroscopy

Abstract

The wide use of antibacterial hand soaps containing triclosan has raised a potential threat to health, and the detection of triclosan is thus extremely important. Here we introduce an efficient approach for nondestructive screening of triclosan in hand soaps. Using Raman spectroscopy in a digitally labelled approach, we utilized the strategy of modified competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (MCARS) to assign spectral features according to a higher density wavelet transform (HDWT) domain, which is named digital labeled Raman spectroscopy (DLRS). DLRS efficiently isolates the features of triclosan from matrix components, enabling the nondestructive quantitative analysis of triclosan in real antibacterial hand soaps, irrespective of the details of the soap matrix. We demonstrate the feasibility of DLRS using a practical test in which we seek to quantify triclosan in several kinds of antibacterial hand soaps nondestructively. The results illustrate DLRS as a promising tool for nondestructive detection of triclosan in antibacterial hand soaps without any sample pretreatment, which may well extend to digital separation of some analytes of interest in the presence of complex chemical substances.