A method for performing noninvasive blood glucose measurements was developed. The method is based on mid-infrared absorption spectroscopy and uses only a few wavenumbers to measure blood glucose levels unconditionally. We found that the regression of blood glucose levels using only three wavenumbers, which were selected using a series cross-validation technique, realized accuracies comparable to those of cases in which a greater number of wavenumbers are used. In addition, we demonstrated the performance of this model through correlations among different types of data.

We constructed a lens-free in-line optical isolator by embedding an isolator chip in a thermally expanded core (TEC) fiber without complicated optical alignment. The chip consists of two pairs of rutile wedges and garnet plates. We fabricated the TEC fibers by heating a single-mode fiber with a 200-mum outer diameter; low loss and a spot diameter as large as 49 mum were successfully obtained. The fabricated isolator has excellent optical properties, an insertion loss of 0.45 dB, and an isolation of more than 50 dB at a 1.55-mum wavelength, which confirms the usefulness of the integration techniques.

Noninvasive, glucose-monitoring technologies using infrared spectroscopy that have been studied typically require a calibration process that involves blood collection, which renders the methods somewhat invasive. We develop a truly noninvasive, glucose-monitoring technique using mid-infrared spectroscopy that does not require blood collection for calibration by applying domain adaptation (DA) using deep neural networks to train a model that associates blood glucose concentration with mid-infrared spectral data without requiring a training dataset labeled with invasive blood sample measurements. For realizing DA, the distribution of unlabeled spectral data for calibration is considered through adversarial update during training networks for regression to blood glucose concentration. This calibration improved the correlation coefficient between the true blood glucose concentrations and predicted blood glucose concentrations from 0.38 to 0.47. The result indicates that this calibration technique improves prediction accuracy for mid-infrared glucose measurements without any invasively acquired data.

Hollow glass fibers for delivery of mid-infrared lasers are drawn from a glass-tube preform to produce a long and flexible hollow fiber at low cost. To utilize the interference effect of the thin glass wall, the wall thickness is controlled by the drawing speed. A Pyrex-glass hollow fiber with an inner diameter of 280 microm and a wall thickness of 9.92 microm shows a low loss at 2.94 microm of the Er:YAG laser wavelength when coated with a silver film on the outer surface.