Ricerc@Sapienza

Advancement of technology and device miniaturization have made near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) techniques cost–effective, small–sized, simple, and ready to use. We applied NIRS to analyze healthy human muscles in vivo, and we found that this technique produces reliable and reproducible spectral “fingerprints” of individual muscles, that can be successfully discriminated by chemometric predictive models.

Human skeletal muscles may undergo qualitative and quantitative, physiological and pathological changes during life. Some of these changes may be detected with imaging techniques, others with immunohystochemical and molecular analysis. Both these types of investigation are expensive, time consuming, and not readily available. Therefore, at present, a cheap, reliable, and widely applicable technique for non-invasive in vivo analysis of human muscles is lacking.

Optical spectroscopy is a powerful tool in research and industrial applications. Its properties of being rapid, non-invasive
and not destructive make it a promising technique for qualitative as well as quantitative analysis in medicine. Recent
advances in materials and fabrication techniques provided portable, performant, sensing spectrometers readily operated
by user-friendly cabled or wireless systems. We used such a system to test whether infrared spectroscopy techniques,