More from CAC-2008

Its been a long week, absolutely packed. I haven’t gotten to every session, but I thought I’d include a few notes about several more talks I really enjoyed.

Selena Richards presented “Self-Modeling Curve Resolution: a new approach to recovering temporal metabolite signal modulation in NMR spectroscopic data: Application to a life-long caloric restriction in dogs.” Its been known for some time that restricting caloric intake lengthens the life span of most mammals. This talk is concerned with finding the metabolomic signature of this effect. Besides the novel use of MCR, I enjoyed the talk because the subjects were Labrador Retrievers. We’ve been trying to keep our yellow lab, Jenny, thin, also because she has some joint problems that would be exacerbated if she was over weight. But man, labs will eat anything, so keeping them out of the food can be a challenge! I’m not sure how calorie restriction works in humans, but I’m sure life seems longer!

Steven Short talked on “Determination of Figures of Merit for Near-Infrared and Raman Spectrophotometers by Net Analyte Signal Analysis for a Four Compound Solid Dosage System.” This work discussed how NAS can be used to compare analytical instruments. I took a look at NAS some years ago after Avi Lorber published “Net analyte signal calculation in multivariate calibration.” My main disappointment with NAS, when calculated based on a regression model, is that its a function of the number of factors in the model, and it isn’t particularly useful for picking number of factors. Short gave a nice application of where NAS can be truly useful.

“Resolution of hyperspectral images. Pre-, in- and post-processing” was presented by Anna de Juan. The talk was something of a overview of past work, but really summarized very well many of the possibilities of using MCR in images. Much of this talk is included in her article (with Maeder, Hancewicz and Tauler) “Use of local rank-based spatial information for resolution of spectroscopic images,” J. Chemo, 22, pps 291-298, 2008. I think the work is a good guide for users of PLS/MIA_Toolbox in that it shows a lot of what you can do with the tools.

All in all it was a very good conference. The only down side was that it was sometimes a victim of its own success–there were simply too many talks, posters and people I wanted to talk with to get to them all!

BMW