Rapid qualitative evaluation of velvet antler using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS)

The aim of this work is to study a rapid analysis method to evaluate velvet antler products qualitatively, using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS). We used principal component analysis to select feature lines of LIBS spectra of velvet antler, and built two partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) classification models to distinguish between inferior and good quality velvet antler by using the intensities of all lines and feature lines as input variables, respectively. The correct classification rates (CCRs) of these two models were both 100%. In order to test the robustness of the models, we used these two models to discriminate the samples not included in the training set to build the model, and the CCRs were 87.5% and 100%, respectively. The results demonstrated that combining LIBS with PLS-DA could evaluate the quality of velvet antler, and the robustness could be improved by using the intensities of feature lines as inputs.