Radiography, CT and MRI

Quality control is an important aspect of food production and processing providing foods of acceptable nutritional value, and safety of products. Several characteristics such as size, shape, density, maturity, moisture content, oil content, flavor, firmness, tenderness, color, defects, blemishes, etc., are routinely used in the quality control of agricultural and biological food products. Until recently, most analytical techniques used in quality control required isolation of the food component of interest. The original properties of the product are, therefore, destroyed during sample preparation and analysis. Oftentimes, such analyses are expensive, time consuming, and require sophisticated instrumentation, and hence are not suited for “on-line” quality control of food products. Recent progress in the development of instrumentation utilizing the some physical, optical, acoustic and electromagnetic properties of food products has provided several nondestructive techniques for quality evaluation. Many such methods are highly sensitive, rapid, and reproducible, and have been successively used in routine “on-line” quality control of a large number of samples.