title: Traceability and Quality Control in Traditional Chinese Medicine: From Chemical Fingerprint to Two-Dimensional Barcode.
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.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Quality Research in Chinese Medicine, Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences, University of Macau, Macau ; Information Technology College of Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai Campus, Zhuhai 519087, China.
authors.forename: Yong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Cai
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Quality Research in Chinese Medicine, Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences, University of Macau, Macau ; Research Center for Pharmacognosy, Institute of Chinese Materia Medica, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, Beijing 100700, China.
authors.forename: Xiwen
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Information Technology College of Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai Campus, Zhuhai 519087, China.
authors.forename: Mei
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Quality Research in Chinese Medicine, Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences, University of Macau, Macau.
authors.forename: Xiaojia
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Quality Research in Chinese Medicine, Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences, University of Macau, Macau.
authors.forename: Hao
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-9441-106X
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Quality Research in Chinese Medicine, Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences, University of Macau, Macau.
authors.forename: Jingyun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ni
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Quality Research in Chinese Medicine, Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences, University of Macau, Macau.
authors.forename: Yitao
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang