ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Chem.
Sec. Analytical Chemistry
Multisource Spectral Fusion Combined with Variable Selection for Rapid Geographical Origin Discrimination of Salvia miltiorrhiza
Provisionally accepted
- 1The First Affiliated Hospital of Henan University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Zhengzhou, China
- 2Henan University of Chinese Medicine, Zhengzhou, China
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Salvia miltiorrhiza is a widely used Chinese medicinal herb whose quality is significantly influenced by geographical origin. Establishing reliable methods for origin identification is therefore crucial for quality assurance. In this study, 67 batches of Salvia miltiorrhiza samples from Shandong, Shanxi, Henan, and Sichuan provinces were analyzed using near-infrared (NIR) and mid-infrared (MIR) spectroscopy combined with chemometric techniques. Six preprocessing methods were applied to optimize spectral data, and PLS-DA models were constructed based on the optimized results. To further improve model performance, uninformative variable elimination (UVE), competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS), and random forest (RF) were employed for variable selection. Discriminant models were then established using NIR, MIR, and fused (NIR+MIR) data, with performance evaluated by accuracy. Results showed that in NIR, the 2nd-RF-PLS-DA model achieved the best performance with 96.72% accuracy, while in MIR, the SG-UVE-PLS-DA model reached 98.33% accuracy. After integrating NIR and MIR data, the 2nd-UVE-PLS-DA model achieved 100% accuracy, demonstrating the strongest discriminative capability. These findings demonstrate that combining NIR and MIR spectroscopy with appropriate preprocessing and variable selection strategies fully exploits This is a provisional file, not the final typeset article complementary spectral information, enabling the construction of rapid, reliable, and efficient discriminant models. This approach provides an effective tool for origin tracing of Salvia miltiorrhiza and serves as a methodological reference for advancing quality evaluation of other Chinese herbal medicines.
Keywords: Mid-infrared spectroscopy(MIR), multisource spectral data fusion, Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIR), Salvia miltiorrhiza, variable selection
Received: 23 Oct 2025; Accepted: 27 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Jiao, Wu, Wang, Gui, Yao, Duan and Liu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yue Jiao
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