Objective: To study the leaf venation characteristics of Bidens pilosa and B. pilosa var. radiata and establish an identification method.
Method: LMVP (leaf morphological-venation pattern for identification Chinese herbs), and QAERM (quantitatively analyze and evaluate reliability for the method of identification Chinese herbs) were applied for the study.
Result: Under the transmission-light, the tertiary vein of B. pilosa was discrete, the color was darker, the size was bigger, the shape was short curve, short linear, spot-like and branch-like. However the tertiary vein of B. pilosa var. radiata was continuous linear and color lighter. With the mentioned key difference, the both plants could be successfully identified from each other, the accuracy of identification results (AC) was from 96.7% to 97.7%. The repeatability of identification results: agreement rate for observation (ARO) was 95.1% and Kappa value was 0.90.
Conclusion: The established method is simple, rapid, economic and reliable.