Stratum Corneum 2018

Project of Ngai Mun Hong, G Pastorin (Department of Pharmacy NUS), S Gupta (Procter and Gamble Singapore Company)

Stratum corneum (SC) is the top layer of the skin protecting the body from water loss and invasion of biological and chemical agents. Typical approach for the infrared characterization of SC lipids and proteins use attenuated total reflection (ATR) sampling in the macroscopic scale. Proposed here novel way of measurement for this kind of samples allows for obtaining microscopic chemical information and investigating heterogeneity of the samples. In this case, special attention must be paid to hyperspectral data pre-processing methods to ensure reliability of the research and to extract the representative spectra for every sample. Innovative method for the removal of outlier pixels by performing principal component analysis on spectra is proposed. Finally representative spectrum for each sample is extracted Investigation of the properties of SC lipids and proteins is of utmost importance for basic research and for the practical applications in the industry of skin-care and beauty products. Spectra pre-processing, and subsequent data analysis and visualization was conducted by means of R Environment, open-source platform for statistical computing.