Abstract
Currently, the chemical fingerprint comparison and analysis is mainly based on professional equipment and software, it’s expensive and inconvenient. This study aims to integrate QR (Quick Response) code with quality data and mobile intelligent technology to develop a convenient query terminal for tracing quality in the whole industrial chain of TCM (traditional Chinese medicine). Three herbal medicines were randomly selected and their chemical two-dimensional barcode (2D) barcodes fingerprints were constructed. Smartphone application (APP) based on Android system was developed to read initial data of 2D chemical barcodes, and compared multiple fingerprints from different batches of same species or different species. It was demonstrated that there were no significant differences between original and scanned TCM chemical fingerprints. Meanwhile, different TCM chemical fingerprint QR codes could be rendered in the same coordinate and showed the differences very intuitively. To be able to distinguish the variations of chemical fingerprint more directly, linear interpolation angle cosine similarity algorithm (LIACSA) was proposed to get similarity ratio. This study showed that QR codes can be used as an effective information carrier to transfer quality data. Smartphone application can rapidly read quality information in QR codes and convert data into TCM chemical fingerprints.
Highlights
The industrial chain of traditional Chinese medicine is a complicated process including multiple steps
Chemical fingerprints of TCM is an important quality control models and technologies to identify the quality of traditional Chinese medicines [1,2,3]
We demonstrated that this APP could distinguish different batches of Chinese herbal medicine of the same species and identify the quality of different species by scanning chemical two-dimensional QR codes
Summary
The industrial chain of traditional Chinese medicine is a complicated process including multiple steps. Chemical fingerprints of TCM is an important quality control models and technologies to identify the quality of traditional Chinese medicines [1,2,3]. Mobile intelligent technology and two-demensional code scanning provided probability to trace good quality or bad of TCM in circulation and personal consumer terminal. An application based on Android system was developed to recognize and analysis the chemical QR codes of Chinese medicine by scanning QR codes. We demonstrated that this APP could distinguish different batches of Chinese herbal medicine of the same species and identify the quality of different species by scanning chemical two-dimensional QR codes
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