Rapid Determination of Puerarin by Near‑infrared Spectroscopy During Percolation and Concentration Process of Puerariae Lobatae Radix

Background: Gegen (Puerariae Labatae Radix) is one of the important medicines in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The studies showed that Gegen and its preparation had effective actions for atherosclerosis. Objective: Near‑infrared (NIR) was used to develop a method for rapid determination of puerarin during percolation and concentration process of Gegen. Materials and Methods: About ten batches of samples were collected with high‑performance liquid chromatography analysis values as reference, calibration models are generated by partial least‑squares (PLS) regression as linear regression, and artificial neural networks (ANN) as nonlinear regression. Results: The root mean square error of prediction for the PLS and ANN model was 0.0396 and 0.0365 and correlation coefficients (r2) was 97.79% and 98.47%, respectively. Conclusions: The NIR model for the rapid analysis of puerarin can be used for on‑line quality control in the percolation and concentration process.