Electronic Nose and Its Application in Chinese Materia Medica
电子鼻技术及其在中药领域中的应用

Electronic nose (EN) is a rapid, simple, sensitive and accurate technology for the quality evaluation of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). In this paper, several Chinese materia medica (CMM) samples of different species, habitats, storage time, and so on were analyzed by EN. Based on experimental data, specific discrimination model was established according to specific research target using different pattern recognition algorithms including PCA, DFA, PLS, BP-ANN and so on. It was found that the models were reliable and stable. It was concluded that EN can be applied to effectively extract and analyze the odor traits of CMM. It is a unique and useful tool for research on the identification, quality control and validity evaluation of CMM.