Quality Evaluation and Quality Control of Botanicals and Traditional Chinese Medicine

Abstract

This presentation will introduce a systemic strategy and relative technologies for the quality evaluation of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), including the identification and differentiation of botanicals and also the quality standard of TCM products. The emphasis will focus on the quality control of manufacture of TCM products, especially to introduce an application of NIRS online analytical technique and quality-based control system into the extraction procedure of TCM. The system hardware was composed of the extraction equipment, the online sample pre-treatment subsystem, the NIRS subsystem, the online NIRS analysis and intelligent control subsystem, and the automatic control subsystem. A diagram of the system is shown in Fig. 1. The whole system includes cooperative-working hardware and software components. The extraction process of TCM was analyzed using online NIRS, and the results demonstrated that NIRS was feasible to be applied to online monitoring and controlling in the manufacturing of TCM. Based on the online NIRS analysis technology, the real-time monitoring of the effective components or indicative components in the extraction procedure, the analysis of the extraction ratios, the diagnosis of the extraction procedure, and the real-time feedback control based on the quality status were actualized.