Optical coherence tomography visualizes microstructure of apple peel

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• 作者：Pieter Verboven^a ; ^{pieter.verboven@biw.kuleuven.be} ; Alexandra Nemeth^b ; Metadel K. Abera^a ; Evi Bongaers^e ; Dirk Daelemans^c ; Pascale Estrade^f ; Els Herremans^a ; Maarten Hertog^a ; Wouter Saeys^a ; Els Vanstreels^c ; Bert Verlinden^d ; Michael Leitner^b ; Bart Nicolaï ; ^a ; ^d
• 关键词：Non-destructive technique ; Cuticle ; Lenticel ; Wax ; Epidermis ; Calcium
• 刊名：Postharvest Biology and Technology
• 出版年：2013
• 出版时间：April, 2013
• 年：2013
• 卷：78
• 期：Complete
• 页码：123-132
• 全文大小：1710 K

文摘

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has emerged recently as a non-destructive technique to visualize subsurface structures of materials. The objective of this work was to investigate whether OCT is an appropriate method to non-destructively assess the peel structural properties of apple fruit and to compare OCT to confocal microscopy and micro-CT. Peel structural properties of apples from different cultivars (¡®Braeburn¡¯, ¡®Arlet¡¯, ¡®Royal Gala¡¯ and ¡®Ida Red¡¯) were measured. The effects of preharvest fertilization treatments and storage duration on calculated structural properties of apple peel from OCT images were investigated. It was found that OCT is a fast, high resolution and high field of view technique that renders 2D and 3D images of apple peel. En-face OCT allows the visualization of the surface topology including cracks in the wax, surface roughness and lenticels. Depth scans with OCT reveal the cellular structure down to a few hundreds of micrometre into the fruit, superior to confocal imaging. Spectral-domain OCT resulted in higher quality images than time-domain OCT. Cuticle, epidermis and hypodermis cells can be resolved in a superior way compared to micro-CT. It was concluded that OCT can be used to visualize peel structural differences between apples, as well as to measure structural changes that occur during storage. OCT is a fast method and allows for combining a high depth resolution with a wide lateral image size.