Abstract
Areca nut, commonly known locally as Semen Arecae (SA) in China, has been used as an important Chinese herbal medicine for thousands of years. The raw SA (RAW) is commonly processed by stir-baking to yellow (SBY), stir-baking to dark brown (SBD), and stir-baking to carbon dark (SBC) for different clinical uses. In our present investigation, intelligent sensory technologies consisting of computer vision (CV), electronic nose (E-nose), and electronic tongue (E-tongue) were employed in order to develop a novel and accurate method for discrimination of SA and its processed products. Firstly, the color parameters and electronic sensory responses of E-nose and E-tongue of the samples were determined, respectively. Then, indicative components including 5-hydroxymethyl furfural (5-HMF) and arecoline (ARE) were determined by HPLC. Finally, principal component analysis (PCA) and discriminant factor analysis (DFA) were performed. The results demonstrated that these three instruments can effectively discriminate SA and its processed products. 5-HMF and ARE can reflect the stir-baking degree of SA. Interestingly, the two components showed close correlations to the color parameters and sensory responses of E-nose and E-tongue. In conclusion, this novel method based on CV, E-nose, and E-tongue can be successfully used to discriminate SA and its processed products.
Highlights
Areca nut, commonly known locally as Semen Arecae (SA) in China, is a product from Areca catechu (Areca palm tree) that has been used as an important Chinese herbal medicine for thousands of years
According to the color parameters that were acquired by computer vision (CV), 6 parameters (R, G, B, L∗, a∗, and b∗) were used as the inputs of principal component analysis (PCA)
40 samples of each group were used as the calibrating group to train the model, and the remaining 10 unknown samples were injected into the model used as the testing group
Summary
Commonly known locally as Semen Arecae (SA) in China, is a product (dried seed preparation) from Areca catechu (Areca palm tree) that has been used as an important Chinese herbal medicine for thousands of years. The raw SA (RAW) is commonly processed by stir-baking to yellow (SBY), stir-baking to dark brown (SBD), and stir-baking to carbon dark (SBC) for different clinical uses. The other three processed products of SA are stir-baked from RAW, the efficacies are very different. It was evaluated according to the characters of color, odor, or taste by trained specialists, which is called human sensory analysis. Human sensory analysis is a simple, rapid, and nondestructive method, but it is highly dependent on subjective judgment and might be swayed by physical and environmental factors [2]. In order to overcome these weaknesses of Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine the above-mentioned analysis methods, we proposed to use intelligent sensory technologies to discriminate SA and its processed products
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