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Development of a machine learning-based method for the analysis of microplastics in environmental samples using µ-Raman spectroscopy
Summary
Researchers developed a machine learning system to identify microplastics in environmental samples using Raman spectroscopy — a technique that identifies materials by how they scatter light — training it on over 64,000 spectra and achieving recall above 99% and precision above 97%. Combining the AI with human review reduced analysis time from several hours to under one hour per sample, making microplastic monitoring far more practical at scale.
Abstract This research project investigates the potential of machine learning for the analysis of microplastic Raman spectra in environmental samples. Based on a data set of > 64,000 Raman spectra (10.7% polymer spectra) from 47 environmental or waste water samples, two methods of deep learning (one single model and one model per class) with the Rectified Linear Unit function (ReLU) (hidden layer) as the activation function and the sigmoid function as the output layer were evaluated and compared to human-only annotation. Based on the one-model-per-class algorithm, an approach for human–machine teaming was developed. This method makes it possible to analyze microplastic (polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride, and polyethylene terephthalate) spectra with high recall (≥ 99.4%) and precision (≥ 97.1%). Compared to human-only spectra annotation, the human–machine teaming reduces the researchers’ time required per sample from several hours to less than one hour.