Non-contact bacterial identification and decontamination based on laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy

Abstract

As a new kind of modern military biological weapon, bacterial agents pose a serious threat to the public health security of human beings. Existing bacterial identification requires manual sampling and testing, which is time-consuming, and may also introduce secondary contamination or radioactive hazards during decontamination. In this paper, a non-contact, nondestructive and "green" bacterial identification and decontamination technology based on laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is proposed. The principal component analysis (PCA) combined with support vector machine (SVM) based on radial basis kernel function is used to establish the classification model of bacteria, and the two-dimensional decontamination test of bacteria is carried out using laser-induced low-temperature plasma combined with a vibration mirror. The experimental results show that the average identification rate of the seven types of bacteria, including Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis, Pseudomonas fluorescens, Bacillus megatherium, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Bacillus thuringiensis and Enterococcus faecalis reaches 98.93%, and the corresponding true positive rate, precision, recall and F1-score reaches 0.9714, 0.9718, 0.9714 and 0.9716, respectively. The optimal decontamination parameters are laser defocusing amount of -50 mm, laser repetition rate of 15-20 kHz, scanning speed of 150 mm/s and number of scans of 10. In this way, the decontamination speed can reach 25.6 mm²/min, and the inactivation rates for both Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis are higher than 98%. In addition, it is confirmed that the inactivation rate of plasma is 4 times higher than that of thermal ablation, meaning that the decontamination ability of LIBS mainly relies on the plasma rather than the thermal ablation effect. The new non-contact bacterial identification and decontamination technology does not require sample pretreatment, and can quickly identify bacteria in situ and decontaminate the surfaces of precision instruments, sensitive materials, etc., which has potential application value in modern military, medical and public health fields.

Keywords: Bacterial decontamination; Bacterial identification; Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS); Low-temperature plasma; The inactivation rates.