A methodology based on NIR-microscopy for the detection of animal protein by-products

This study develops a methodology based on NIR-microscopy analysis and chemometric tools for the detection of animal protein by-products in mixtures, such as compound feeds and mixtures of ingredients, using a library of animal meal by-products only. The proposed methodology is a two-step strategy which worked better than the SIMCA approach it was compared with. In the first step, animal particles are identified using one of two methods, a global or a local distance measure. In the second, K-nearest-neighbours (KNN) is used to discriminate between terrestrial and fish particles. The models were developed using a training set comprising 11,727 spectra of pure terrestrial meals and 5843 of fish meals. KNN using second derivative spectra and five neighbours correctly classifies 98.5% of these samples under cross-validation. The procedure was validated using two external datasets, one made up of mixtures of species (fish and bovine), and a second of commercial compound feeds. The results obtained confirm that the procedure is able to reliably detect the presence of animal meals, although further work would be needed to develop it into an accurate quantitative method.