Visible Light and AI: Identifying Organic Molecules

Researchers have developed a method to identify organic compounds using machine learning and the refractive index at a single optical wavelength. The technique could have applications for automated chemical analysis that is cheaper, safer and requires less expertise to operate. The machine learning was trained on a publicly available database of past optical experiments with published data from scientific literature dating back to 1940. The researchers achieved molecular classification testing accuracies in the visible regions better than 98%.