A novel honey authenticity detection system based on external cavity quantum cascade laser

Limited by the flexibility of the detection instrument, the current research reports on rapid detection of honey authenticity are mainly about algorithm research under the laboratory conditions. External cavity quantum cascade laser (EC-QCL) is a new sensor technology, has the advantages of high power, high flux and high flexibility, which is very suitable for the development of in-situ detection instrument. In this study, we developed a novel miniaturized detection system based on EC-QCL for detecting sweeteners in Vitex honey, and established the discrimination model of honey authenticity based on the EC-QCL detection system combined with partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) and support vector machine (SVM), respectively. The accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of the validation set of the best model were both 100%, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUROC) is greater than 0.99. In addition, the performance of the discrimination model trained using data obtained by EC-QCL system are better than that established by traditional detection equipment under the same conditions. The results show that EC-QCL detection system provides a potential solution for the rapid in-situ detection of honey authenticity.