A Universal and Accurate Method for Easily Identifying Components in Raman Spectroscopy Based on Deep Learning

Raman spectroscopy has been widely used to provide the structural fingerprint for molecular identification. Due to interference from coexisting components, noise, baseline, and systematic differences between spectrometers, component identification with Raman spectra is challenging, especially for mixtures. In this study, a method entitled DeepRaman has been proposed to solve those problems by combining the comparison ability of a pseudo-Siamese neural network (pSNN) and the input-shape flexibility of spatial pyramid pooling (SPP). DeepRaman was trained, validated, and tested with 41,564 augmented Raman spectra from two databases (pharmaceutical material and S.T. Japan). It can achieve 96.29% accuracy, 98.40% true positive rate (TPR), and 94.36% true negative rate (TNR) on the test set. Another six data sets measured on different instruments were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method from different aspects. DeepRaman can provide accurate identification results and significantly outperform the hit quality index (HQI) method and other deep learning models. In addition, it performs well in cases of different spectral complexity and low-content components. Once the model is established, it can be used directly on different data sets without retraining or transfer learning. Furthermore, it also obtains promising results for the analysis of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) data sets and Raman imaging data sets. In summary, it is an accurate, universal, and ready-to-use method for component identification in various application scenarios.