Temperature measurements of turbid aqueous solutions using near-infrared spectroscopy.

We report a method that uses near-infrared spectroscopy and multivariate analysis to measure the temperature of turbid aqueous solutions. The measurement principle is based on the fact that the peak wavelength of the water absorption band, with its center near 1440 nm, shifts with changes in temperature. This principle was used to measure the temperatures of 1 mm thick samples of aqueous solutions containing Intralipid (2%), which are often used as optical phantoms for biological tissues due to similar scattering characteristics. Temperatures of pure water and aqueous solutions containing glucose (100 mg/ml and 200 mg/ml) were also measured for comparison. For the turbid Intralipid solutions, the absorbance spectrum varied irregularly with time due to the change in scattering characteristics. However, by making use of the difference between the absorbance at 1412 nm and the temperature-independent absorbance at 1440 nm, we obtained SEPs (standard error of prediction) of 0.3 degrees C and 0.2 degrees C by univariate linear regression and partial least squares regression, respectively. These accuracies were almost the same as those for the transparent samples (pure water and glucose solution).