Handheld NIRS analysis for routine meat quality control: Database transfer from at-line instruments

Innovative advances in Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) instrumentation have enabled the development of new miniaturized spectrometers that combine NIRS technology with micro-electro-mechanical platforms, thus opening up new horizons for industrial NIRS applications. Many agro-food industries, laboratories and research centres already have large databases/libraries, built up over many years using NIR spectrometers; it is clearly important to preserve these data sets in order to avoid having to research and develop NIRS applications from scratch every time a new instrument appears on the market. Three standardization algorithms—Direct Standardization (DS), Piecewise Direct Standardization (PDS) and Spectral Difference by Wavelengths (SDW)—and varying numbers of standardization samples were evaluated for transferring meat quality databases from a high-performance at-line NIRS monochromator to a handheld based on micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) NIRS spectrometer. The SDW algorithm and the use of 8 standardization samples yielded the best Standard Error of Prediction (SEP) values for the three chemical parameters transferred (0.72% for fat, 0.73% for moisture and 0.66% for protein). The successful transfer of the database to the MEMS-NIRS device enables a new approach for fast, low-cost, on-line/in-situ analysis of meat products.

► The SDW algorithm enables transfer of databases for meat from at-line to handheld NIRS spectrometers.
► Eight muscle standardization samples are sufficient to perform a suitable database transfer.
► The MEMS-NIRS device enables simple, fast and low-cost quantitative quality-control analysis for meat.