Several diseases like pancreatic insufficiency or hepatic disorders cause malabsorption or maldigestion. The resulting changes in stool composition (e.g., in moisture, nitrogen content, or fat content) provide important information for medical diagnostics.

Time-consuming lab methods which require a significant amount of sample preparation can be replaced by near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) for fast screening of human stool samples with no sample preparation. The NIRS method is easy to use – no chemicals are required and results are given for several parameters within one minute.

The obtained Vis-NIR spectra (Figure 2) were used to create prediction models for the different reference parameters. The data set was split into calibration and validation sets to verify the quality of the prediction models. Correlation diagrams which display the relation between the Vis-NIR prediction and the reference values are shown in Figures 3–5 together with the respective figures of merit (FOM).