Nondestructive Discrimination of Lead (Pb) in Preserved Eggs (Pidan) by Near-Infrared Spectroscopy and Chemometrics

Abstract

A major safety concern with pidan (preserved eggs) has been the usage of lead (II) oxide (PbO) during its processing. This paper develops a rapid and nondestructive method for discrimination of lead (Pb) in preserved eggs with different processing methods by near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and chemometrics. Ten batches of 331 unleaded eggs and six batches of 147 eggs processed with usage of PbO were collected and analyzed by NIR spectroscopy. Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) analysis was used as a reference method for Pb identification. The Pb contents of leaded eggs ranged from 1.2 to 12.8 ppm. Linear partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLSDA) and nonlinear least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) were used to classify samples based on NIR spectra. Different preprocessing methods were studied to improve the classification performance. With second-order derivative spectra, PLSDA and LS-SVM obtained accurate and reliable classification of leaded and unleaded preserved eggs. The sensitivity and specificity of PLSDA were 0.975 and 1.000, respectively. Because the strictest safety standard of Pb content in traditional pidan is 2 ppm, the proposed method shows the feasibility for rapid and nondestructive discrimination of Pb in Chinese preserved eggs.