Quality Traceability System of Traditional Chinese Medicine Based on Two Dimensional Barcode Using Mobile Intelligent Technology

PLoS One. 2016 Oct 25;11(10):e0165263. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0165263. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Currently, the chemical fingerprint comparison and analysis is mainly based on professional equipment and software, it's expensive and inconvenient. This study aims to integrate QR (Quick Response) code with quality data and mobile intelligent technology to develop a convenient query terminal for tracing quality in the whole industrial chain of TCM (traditional Chinese medicine). Three herbal medicines were randomly selected and their chemical two-dimensional barcode (2D) barcodes fingerprints were constructed. Smartphone application (APP) based on Android system was developed to read initial data of 2D chemical barcodes, and compared multiple fingerprints from different batches of same species or different species. It was demonstrated that there were no significant differences between original and scanned TCM chemical fingerprints. Meanwhile, different TCM chemical fingerprint QR codes could be rendered in the same coordinate and showed the differences very intuitively. To be able to distinguish the variations of chemical fingerprint more directly, linear interpolation angle cosine similarity algorithm (LIACSA) was proposed to get similarity ratio. This study showed that QR codes can be used as an effective information carrier to transfer quality data. Smartphone application can rapidly read quality information in QR codes and convert data into TCM chemical fingerprints.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Chromatography, High Pressure Liquid / methods
  • DNA Barcoding, Taxonomic / methods*
  • Drugs, Chinese Herbal / chemistry*
  • Drugs, Chinese Herbal / classification
  • Mobile Applications

Substances

  • Drugs, Chinese Herbal

Grants and funding

This research was supported by the funding of University of Macau (MYRG2016-00055-ICMS-QRCM), Hong Kong, Macao & Taiwan Science and Technology Cooperation Project (2015DFM30030), ICMM basic research funding (ZZ2014029), and Open Foundation of State Key Laboratory of Hydraulics and Mountain River Engineering, Sichuan University (SKHL1419).