Feasibility study of detecting plum’s early mechanical injury based on optical coherence tomography and cell morphological parameters

Abstract

With a distinct flavor, plum fruit is rich in proteins, potassium, calcium, phosphorus, and nitrogen and has high nutritional and medical value (Crisosto & Kader, 2000;Ertekin et al., 2006). During harvesting, transportation and storage, however, mechanical injury is frequently caused by external vibrations and bumps (Lien et al., 2009). Consequently, browning gradually occurs in the injured tissues and spreads around afterwards, resulting in a massive decay (Ceponis et al., 1987), which shortens the plum's shelf life, weakens its sales value, and causes huge economic losses (Martinez-Romero et al., 2004). A fast non-destructive discriminate method, which can help to detect the mechanical injury in the epidermal tissues, turns to be particularly significant. Refrigeration is usually applied in normal storage to decelerate the decay, which, on the other hand, restrains the obvious browning in plum's injured tissues that have intact epidermis. Hence, detecting plum's early mechanical injury, which has undamaged epidermis, is always a challenge (Li et al., 2017).

Nondestructive Assessment of Woody Breast Myopathy in Chicken Fillets Using Optical Coherence Tomography Imaging with Machine Learning

“…In recent years, several studies have explored the application of OCT in agriculture and food-related elds, such as detecting disease in seeds and kernels (Lee et al, 2011), analyzing dried fruit tissue (Rizzolo et al, 2014), investigating the structural and tissue properties of fruits and vegetables (Li et al, 2015;Verboven et al, 2013), and sub-skin bruise detection in fruits (Zhou et al, 2018(Zhou et al, , 2021. Zhou et al (2022) used OCT for automatic non-invasive early detection of mold on maize kernels based on locating the mold attached to the upper pericarp layer.…”