Rapid discrimination of Notoginseng powder adulteration of different grades using FT-MIR spectroscopy combined with chemometrics

Abstract Panax Notoginseng is a kind of herb material with high medicinal value, which requires adaptive planting environment, and not can be continuously cultivated in the same ground. Those reasons lead to a large number of low-grade Notoginseng appears in the market. The objective of this study is to discriminate adulterant of Notoginseng of different grades by FT-MIR spectroscopy couple with chemometrics. In the experiment, high-grade Notoginseng was adulterated with 14 blend ratios: 0%, 1%, 3%, 5%, 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, and 100% of low-grade Notoginseng. All samples were scanned in the range of 4000–400 cm −1 by FT-MIR spectra instrument in absorption mode. Baseline, standard normal variate (SNV), multiplicative scatter correction (MSC), orthogonal signal correction (OSC), first derivative (D1) with 11-points smoothing and second derivative (D2) with 11-points smoothing were used to preprocess the spectral data, in which Baseline combined with SNV and D1 with 11-points performed best. The spectral data in the range of 1485–405 cm −1 were selected by interval partial least squares (iPLS) for modeling. Then, Support vector machine (SVM) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) were applied for modeling analysis. The best result was achieved by SVM, as the classification accuracy was 100%, which indicated that FT-MIR spectroscopy combined with chemometrics was an effective approach to identify Notoginseng powder adulteration. It could detect the blend ratio of 5% (w/w) as well as the blend ratio of over 5%.