Recent developments in applications of MRI techniques for foods and agricultural produce—an overview

Abstract

For the detection of defects, evaluation of internal quality and analysis of internal structures in food and biological materials, there is a number of image acquisition techniques available so far. Among them, MRI has the advantage of allowing a variety of measurements to be made that not only contribute to the evaluation of maturity and quality parameters in fruits and vegetables and other food materials but also improve the understanding of underlying physiological processes. So, the ability of MRI to function in a completely non-destructive and to encode molecular dynamics through different contrast mechanism has encouraged developments of many applications in various fields. An overview of MRI as non-destructive detection in quality of food and agricultural produce and its application in postharvest sorting and processing have been presented in this paper. This paper elaborated principle of MRI, function of its components, quality detection methods, and discussed recent research and applications. Since, no paper yet published on MRI, covered so wide applications as included in this work, its importance being increased more.