Correlation analysis between acoustic and sensory technique data for cooked pork loin samples

Dry-cured loin characterization by ultrasound physicochemical and sensory parameters

“…The ultrasonic inspection equipment and procedures coincide with those described in previous works by the authors [18,35]. For this reason, we will limit ourselves here to briefly describe them, emphasizing those most interesting and novel aspects.…”

“…The ultrasound pulse velocity (UPV) is based on the 'time of flight' (TOF), i.e., the time lapsed from the signal' emission until its reception. This method had already been applied to determine the ultrasonic velocity in pork loins [18]. Since the distance d between both transducers is known, the velocity is calculated with the following equation:…”

“…3) are not close to Gaussian at all, so the highest amplitude frequency of the FFT (FFTCentral) is not a priori a meaningful value to characterize the inspected samples. In order to facilitate the subsequent analysis, the cumulative frequency periodograms are constructed to show the FFT frequencies corresponding to the 25t and 99th percentiles of the received signals [18,19], i.e., if the cumulative frequency corresponding to the 25th percentile is at f Hz for an specific inspection, this means that 25% of the received signals had a frequency of less than f Hz. Thus, for each A-scan and subsequent FFT and frequency periodogram, the parameters of the different percentiles of the signals received were denoted as FFT25 and FFT99.…”

“…2), makes it unfeasible to determine it with the traditional calculation [25,26]. Then, given that the nature of dry-cured loins makes it impossible to distinguish echoes, the attenuation was evaluated from the signal's progressive energy loss, obtaining the parameters as a function of time taken to receive determined energy percentages [18,19,35], particularly, 10, and 50%, (AT10 and AT50, respectively), expressed as a multiple of the TOF (n•TOF). Thus defined, a value of AT50 equal to 1.063, for example, would indicate…”

“…This has led to the evaluation of the capability of different technique to analyze quality characteristics of meat products [13][14][15]. Low intensity ultrasound inspection is one of the most reliable recent technologies to characterize the quality in food [16,17], and its ability has also been proven in pork loins [18][19][20]. Moreover, non-destructive ultrasonic inspection has been used for the ultrasound characterization of different dry-cured meat products [21], to assess textural changes in vacuum packaged sliced Iberian ham [22], and to monitor the pork loin and ham dry-salting process [23,24].…”