Assessment of quality consistency in traditional Chinese medicine using multi‐wavelength fusion profiling by integrated quantitative fingerprint method: Niuhuang Jiedu pill as an example

Abstract

Under the wave of the revival of traditional Chinese medicine, there is a quite imperative duty to study an integrated and comprehensive method of fingerprint data processing and analysis on the quality consistency of traditional Chinese medicine. So, we proposed six parameters from two aspects (qualitative and quantitative), three levels (biased to strong peaks, biased to weak peaks, no obvious bias), to comprehensively evaluate the similarity of the two fingerprints. On this basis, another five parameters were proposed to evaluate the integrated effects (consistency, volatility, and similarity). This method was applied to 22 batches of Niuhuang Jiedu pill samples. Next, a practical and convenient multi‐wavelength fusion method was designed to provide more information, and the generated fusion profilings were used for subsequent evaluation. The characteristics of the parameters were confirmed by correlation analysis. The results of both hierarchical clustering analysis and principal component analysis for raw data and standardized data were consistent with integrated quantitative fingerprint method results. At the same time, this method gave a reasonable explanation for abnormal and dissimilar samples. This work illustrated that the proposed method was particularly suitable for similarity analysis of fingerprints and capable of ensuring the quality consistency in traditional Chinese medicine.

Recent advances of novel technologies for quality consistency assessment of natural herbal medicines and preparations

“…In recent years, Sun et al have proposed a multi-component quantitative fingerprint technology that combines multi-wavelength measurement and metrological analysis to prove and verify the consistency of the quality of natural Chinese herbal medicine [33][34][35][36][37][38].…”

Establishing a chromatographic fingerprint using tandem UV/charged aerosol detection and similarity analysis for Shengmai capsule: A novel method for natural product quality control

“…2 However, unsupervised exploratory analysis techniques, such as principal component analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis, are not suitable for the quality assessment of small sample data sets. 5 Second, the assigned weights of the similarity analysis methods cannot reflect the response difference related to the amount of components in a sample. Some main pharmacodynamic components have small signal responses in the chromatogram and make little contribution to the similarity results, which would reduce the ability of discerning the false from the genuine and the grade of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).…”

“…In the early research, our group introduced a weighting algorithm according to the variations of the peaks and successfully evaluated the quality consistency of Shenmai injection by principal component analysis 2 . However, unsupervised exploratory analysis techniques, such as principal component analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis, are not suitable for the quality assessment of small sample data sets 5 . Second, the assigned weights of the similarity analysis methods cannot reflect the response difference related to the amount of components in a sample.…”

Analysis of Primary Liquid Chromatography Mass Spectrometry Data by Neural Networks for Plant Samples Classification

“…Thus, two-dimensional (2D) fingerprinting has been introduced to better address the chemical complexity of the herbal preparations [ 5 , 6 ]. Moreover, hyphenated chromatographic and spectrometric approaches, such as HPLC-DAD [ 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 ], GC-MS [ 15 , 16 ], and HPLC-MS [ 17 , 18 ], can greatly enhance the potential of chromatographic fingerprinting. However, in this case, one has to operate with raw analysis data in 3D space.…”