Identifying Traditional Chinese Medicines by the Chemical Imaging Device

In order to identify the elements of traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs), the chemical imaging device is designed in this paper. The liquid crystal tunable filters (LCTFs) are adopted to select the spectrum which is the core hardware of the device. After developing corresponding light source, object lens and CCD camera, the chemical images can be captured. By analyzing the images data, the characteristic spectrum of detected TCMs can be got. The software is also developed to control the LCTFs, CCD camera and image capture card, and to analyze the images data. The working parameters of the device were given to guarantee the validity of the data. As an example, a piece of coptis which is a kind of traditional Chinese medicine was tested. The results show that both the relative content and the distribution of the main element of the coptis can be got. The device is useful not only in TCMs field, but also in other fields such as biology, life sciences, etc.