Similarly to the sense of taste or smell, which is derived from triggering
multiple different signals in receptors of human tongue or in the nasal cavity, also
arrays of cross-reactive sensors give a rise to a characteristic response pattern specific
for each different analytes. While the artificial receptors and sensors are rarely
selective, the fingerprint-like response pattern is analyte specific and substitutes the
sensor selectivity. Thus, the sensing of a particular analyte or a group of analytes using
cross-reactive sensor arrays eliminates the need for analyte-specific sensors, which are
difficult to design and synthesize. Response patterns from optical sensor arrays can be
utilized in the development of low-cost analytical methods suitable for on-site analyses
with high sensitivity, which is especially useful in pharmaceutical and biomedical areas
that require the detection of very low concentration of analytes in complex biological
samples. This chapter focuses on the use of optical sensor arrays in pharmaceutical and
biomedical analyses and pattern recognition, and quantitative analysis of the results
using chemometric methods.
Keywords: Array sensing, Artificial neural networks, Biomedical analysis,
Chemical sensors, Chiral analysis, Chemometric, Colorimetric, Cross-reactive
sensor arrays, Fluorescence, Hierarchical cluster analysis, Linear discriminant
analysis, Multivariate analysis, Optical sensors, Pharmaceutical analysis, Principal
component analysis, Support vector machines.
