The rapid assessment of the microbiological quality of highly perishable food commodities is of great importance. Spectroscopic data coupled with machine learning methods have been investigated intensively in recent years, because of their rapid, non-destructive, eco-friendly qualities and their potential to be used on-, in- or at-line. In the present study, the microbiological quality of chicken burgers was evaluated using Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and multispectral imaging (MSI) in tandem with machine learning algorithms. Six independent batches were purchased from a food industry and stored at 0, 4, and 8 °C. At regular time intervals (specifically every 24 h), duplicate samples were subjected to microbiological analysis, FTIR measurements, and MSI sampling. The samples (n = 274) acquired during the data collection were classified into three microbiological quality groups: “satisfactory”: 4−7 log CFU/g, “acceptable”: 7−8 log CFU/g, and “unacceptable”: >8 logCFU/g. Subsequently, classification models were trained and tested (external validation) with several machine learning approaches, namely partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLSDA), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), logistic regression (LR), and ordinal logistic regression (OLR). Accuracy scores were attained for the external validation, exhibiting FTIR data values in the range of 79.41−89.71%, and, for the MSI data, in the range of 74.63−85.07%. The performance of the models showed merit in terms of the microbiological quality assessment of chicken burgers.
Keywords: Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy; chicken burgers; machine learning; multispectral imaging (MSI).