Qualitative and quantitative assessment of the HPLC fingerprints of Ginkgo biloba extract by the involution...

In this paper, we develop a new method for evaluating chromatographic fingerprints of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) by the average involution similarity and the quantitative involution similarity. To validate this novel approach, we studied the chromatographic fingerprints of Ginkgo biloba extract by the new similarity parameters. The results were compared with those of the cosine of vectorial angle (S(F)), the correlative coefficient (r) and some other quantitative parameters, such as the apparent quantitative similarity of fingerprint R% and the average mass percentage M%. The approach represented in this paper was proved to well reflect the similarity alteration of each batch of Ginkgo biloba extract and the quantitative differences of the extracted constituents. The S(gxq) and S(gxsq) are the best qualitive and quantitative similarity parameters of all those mentioned in this paper; they can be profitably used for the qualitative and quantitative assessments of TCM chromatographic fingerprints. Through this study, the quality evaluation of TCM can be simplified by using only one parameter of with the qualitive and quantitative functions proposed in this paper.