Quantitative Analysis of Catalpol in Chinese Patent Medicine Lixin Pill by Near-infrared Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy

Lixin pill is a typical Chinese patent medicine with anti-rheumatic heart disease activity that has been widely used in clinical practice. Therefore it is very important to detect the concentration of catalpol, as the main component of the active ingredient. Near-infrared reflectance（NIR） spectroscopy was used to study the content of catalpol in the unprocessed Chinese patent medicine of Lixin pills. NIR is applied to quantitatively analyze 77 sam- ples, which were randomly divided into a calibration set containing 61 samples and a prediction set containing 16 samples. To get a satisfying result, partial least squares（PLS） regression was utilized to establish quantitative models. In PLS regression, the values of coefficient of determination（R2） and root mean square error of cross-validation （RMSECV） of PLS regression are 0.9419 and 0.0216, respectively. The process of establishing model, parameters of model, and prediction results were also discussed in detail（root mean square error of prediction is 0.0164）. The over- all results show that NIR spectroscopy can be efficiently utilized for the rapid and accurate analysis of routine chemical compositions in the Chinese patent medicine of Lixin pills. The prediction set suggests that this quantitative analysis model has excellent generalization ability and prediction precision. Accordingly, the result can provide tech- nical support for the further analysis of catalpol in unprocessed Lixin pill. Moreover, this study supplied technical support for the further analysis of other Chinese patent medicine samples.