Measuring Agarwood Formation Ratio Quantitatively by Fluorescence Spectral Imaging Technique.

Botao Huang,Duykien Nguyen,Jinfen Tan,Kaibin Jiang,Shaowei Huang,Chunxin Liu,Jing Zhao,Tianyi Liu

doi:10.1155/2015/205089

Abstract

Agarwood is a kind of important and precious traditional Chinese medicine. With the decreasing of natural agarwood, artificial cultivation has become more and more important in recent years. Quantifying the formation of agarwood is an essential work which could provide information for guiding cultivation and controlling quality. But people only can judge the amount of agarwood qualitatively by experience before. Fluorescence multispectral imaging method is presented to measure the agarwood quantitatively in this paper. A spectral cube from 450 nm to 800 nm was captured under the 365 nm excitation sources. The nonagarwood, agarwood, and rotten wood in the same sample were distinguished based on analyzing the spectral cube. Then the area ratio of agarwood to the whole sample was worked out, which is the quantitative information of agarwood area percentage. To our knowledge, this is the first time that the formation of agarwood was quantified accurately and nondestructively.

Highlights

Gilg) is a dark resinous heartwood that forms in Aquilaria trees, which was distributed in South China such as Hainan province, Guangxi province, and Guangdong province [1,2,3]
Aquilaria sinensis grew in an artificial forest in Huazhou, Guangdong province, China, and were treated by liquid transfusion technology of agarwood formation in the whole body and were cut two years later
The results show that the technique works well on detecting the agarwood formation ratio

Summary

Introduction

Gilg) is a dark resinous heartwood that forms in Aquilaria trees, which was distributed in South China such as Hainan province, Guangxi province, and Guangdong province [1,2,3]. It forms when Aquilaria trees are infected with a type of mould. Agarwood is valued in many cultures for its distinctive fragrance and is used for incense and perfumes. It is known as a kind of famous traditional Chinese medicine. It had been reported that agarwood can help healing rheumatism, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, and many other diseases related to the artery and the heart [8, 9]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion