Meat freshness revealed by visible to near-infrared spectroscopy and principal component analysis

Abstract

Increasing concerns about adulterated meat encouraged industry looking for new non-invasive methods for rapid accurate meat quality assessment. Main meat chromophores (myoglobin, oxy-myoglobin, fat, water, collagen) are characterized by close comparable absorption in visible to near-infrared (NIR) spectral region. Therefore, structural and compositional variations in meat may lead to relative differences in the absorption of light. Utilizing typical fiber-optic probes and integrating sphere, a degradation of pork samples freshness was observed at room temperature referring to the relative changes in absorbance of main meat chromophores. The application of principal component analysis (PCA) used for examination of measured absorbance spectra revealed more detailed sub-stages of freshness, which are not observed by the conventional analysis of the reflectance spectra. The results show a great potential of the combined application of optical-NIR spectroscopy with complementary use of PCA approach for assessing meat quality and monitoring relative absorbance alternation of oxymyoglobin and myoglobin in visible, and fat, water, collagen in NIR spectral ranges.

Evolution of raw meat polarization‐based properties by means of Mueller matrix imaging

“…The changes in total depolarization and scalar retardance spectra are displayed in Figure 2A and B are averaged over 800 × 600 pixels of corresponding images measured at different wavelengths. Apparently, the values of total depolarization and scalar retardance are increasing with the wavelength for both measurement time points, except for the dip at 550-nm wavelength which is attributed to the highest amount of myoglobin absorption 9,59 (Figure 2A). Higher concentration of myoglobin, which tend to have lower degree of scattering and birefringence.…”

“…When probing meat with polarized light, depolarization and rotation of the orientation of the polarization plane are dependent on the preferential orientation of the elongated muscle cells and meat aging. 7,8 Although there have been studies on meat freshness applying spectroscopic approaches, 9 the multiple scattering at visible and near-infrared wavelengths causes difficulties for quantitative tissue spectroscopy and imaging because of shallow penetration depth and the inhomogeneity of tissue which obscures the desired image information. 10 Hence, there is a growing interest to apply polarimetric imaging techniques for investigation of biomedical tissues because diffusely scattered light is often partially polarized to an extent, which can be experimentally, detected and carry additional nonredundant information on tissue optical properties.…”

QCM Sensor Arrays, Electroanalytical Techniques and NIR Spectroscopy Coupled to Multivariate Analysis for Quality Assessment of Food Products, Raw Materials, Ingredients and Foodborne Pathogen Detection: Challenges and Breakthroughs

“…Muscle foods, including meat and fish, are very important from the point of view of human nutrition and commercial activity worldwide [151]. There have been significant efforts, both from the industry and academia, on improving quality and quantity of the raw and processed muscle food types in recent years [151][152][153][154][155]. Accordingly, there have been increasing demands for the development robust and time effective monitoring techniques to track compositional and safety compliance issues as conventional chemical methods of meat quality assessment become more expensive and time consuming.…”

“…Near infrared spectroscopy (NIR) has drawn considerable interest for many reasons, including its portability, speed, cost-effectiveness, suitability for in-line as well as on-line analysis, and the ability to concurrently measure different parameters for a large number of samples [151][152][153][154][155][156][157]. Several studies reported on the use of NIR for meat quality assessment and the analyses of meat properties in live animals or carcasses due to the capability of IR light to penetrate several layers of tissue [151][152][153][154][155][156][157][158][159]. Two published papers demonstrated that the short wavelength radiation in the NIR region of the electromagnetic spectrum can potentially be utilized to non-invasively assess meat quality [152,154].…”

“…Several studies reported on the use of NIR for meat quality assessment and the analyses of meat properties in live animals or carcasses due to the capability of IR light to penetrate several layers of tissue [151][152][153][154][155][156][157][158][159]. Two published papers demonstrated that the short wavelength radiation in the NIR region of the electromagnetic spectrum can potentially be utilized to non-invasively assess meat quality [152,154]. The results of these studies are significant because of the limited literature non-invasive analysis of crucial nutrients in the live animals; thus, these reports fill that gap.…”