Chromatographic fingerprinting and chemometric techniques for quality control of herb medicines

Chromatographic fingerprinting is commonly used for the instrumental inspection of herbal medicines. This chapter has reviewed the chromatographic techniques, especially by hyphenated chromatographies, to obtain chemical finger-prints which can represent appropriately the "chemical integrities" of the herbal medicines and therefore be used for authentication and identification of the herbal products. In order to extract useful information from fingerprints for the authentication and identification purpose, several recently proposed chemometric methods can be utilized for evaluating the fingerprints of herbal medicines, including Shannon information contents, Whittaker smoothing, air-PLS baseline correction, MSPA peak alignment, Haar wavelet peak detection, multivariate resolution, similarity analysis and pattern recognition. It has been showed that the combination of chromatographic fingerprints and the chemometric methods might be a powerful tool for quality control of herbal medicines.