Near-infrared absorption imaging and processing technologies based on gold nanorods

Noble metal nanoparticles with localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) properties are widely used as optical sensors in biochemical detection and medical diagnosis. In this paper, we propose an effective determination method to measure the LSPR absorption intensity of gold nanorods (GNRs). A near-infrared (NIR) imaging system is established, and an NIR absorption image of the multiple samples of the colloidal GNRs is captured. Then, the LSPR absorption intensities of these samples are obtained by calculating the average grayscale of the target areas based on the NIR image processing technology. By using this method, the LSPR absorption intensities of the multiple samples are determined all at once, and their accuracy is as high as that obtained by using spectrophotometry. These results suggest that this method is an efficient multi-channel determination technique with high-throughput sensing applications.