The efficacy of support vector machines in modelling deviations from the Beer-Lambert law for optical measurement of lactate

Lactate is an important biomarker with a significant diagnostic and prognostic ability in relation to life-threatening conditions and diseases such as sepsis, diabetes, cancer, pulmonary and kidney diseases, to name a few. The gold standard method for the measurement of lactate relies on blood sampling, which due to its invasive nature, limits the ability of clinicians in frequent monitoring of patients' lactate levels. Evidence suggests that the optical measurement of lactate holds promise as an alternative to blood sampling. However, achieving this aim requires better understanding of the optical behavior of lactate. The present study investigates the potential deviations of absorbance from the Beer-Lambert law in high concentrations of lactate. To this end, a number of nonlinear models namely support vector machines with quadratic, cubic and quartic kernels and radial basis function kernel are compared with the linear principal component regression and linear support vector machine. Interestingly, it is shown that even in extremely high concentrations of lactate (600 mmol/L) in a phosphate buffer solution, the linear models surpass the performance of the other models.