Electronic Nose and Its Application in Chinese Materia Medica

Electronic nose (E-nose) is a rapid, simple, sensitive and accurate technology for the quality evaluation of Chinese materia medica (CMM). In this paper, several CMM samples of different species, habitats, storage time, and so on were analyzed by E-nose. 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 showed that the models were reliable and stable. It was concluded that E-nose 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.