Abstract
Chemical fingerprinting is currently a widely used tool that enables rapid and accurate quality evaluation of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). However, chemical fingerprints are not amenable to information storage, recognition, and retrieval, which limit their use in Chinese medicine traceability. In this study, samples of three kinds of Chinese medicines were randomly selected and chemical fingerprints were then constructed by using high performance liquid chromatography. Based on chemical data, the process of converting the TCM chemical fingerprint into two-dimensional code is presented; preprocess and filtering algorithm are also proposed aiming at standardizing the large amount of original raw data. In order to know which type of two-dimensional code (2D) is suitable for storing data of chemical fingerprints, current popular types of 2D codes are analyzed and compared. Results show that QR Code is suitable for recording the TCM chemical fingerprint. The fingerprint information of TCM can be converted into data format that can be stored as 2D code for traceability and quality control.
Highlights
The industrial chain of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), from the production of raw materials to the sale of their finished products, is a complicated multilink process
By comparing different encoding types, QR Code is recommended as the best barcode for quality traceability
The high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) technology can make a positive impact on quality control, quality traceability is still hard to implement because chemical fingerprints cannot be transported
Summary
The industrial chain of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), from the production of raw materials to the sale of their finished products, is a complicated multilink process. None of the available tools can combine all links and work for TCM traceability in the whole production process. Current traceability technologies included radio frequency identification [4,5,6], barcode [7], and other combined techniques based on web [8]. These technologies were mainly used in circulation links and they could not provide quality information of products. A new method is required to run through each link of TCM and can carry quality traceability information
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