| Abstract: | Under the wave of the revival of traditional Chinese medicine, there is a quite imperative duty to study an integrated and comprehensive method of fingerprint data processing and analysis on the quality consistency of traditional Chinese medicine. So, we proposed six parameters from two aspects (qualitative and quantitative), three levels (biased to strong peaks, biased to weak peaks, no obvious bias), to comprehensively evaluate the similarity of the two fingerprints. On this basis, another five parameters were proposed to evaluate the integrated effects (consistency, volatility, and similarity). This method was applied to 22 batches of Niuhuang Jiedu pill samples. Next, a practical and convenient multi‐wavelength fusion method was designed to provide more information, and the generated fusion profilings were used for subsequent evaluation. The characteristics of the parameters were confirmed by correlation analysis. The results of both hierarchical clustering analysis and principal component analysis for raw data and standardized data were consistent with integrated quantitative fingerprint method results. At the same time, this method gave a reasonable explanation for abnormal and dissimilar samples. This work illustrated that the proposed method was particularly suitable for similarity analysis of fingerprints and capable of ensuring the quality consistency in traditional Chinese medicine. |
