An electronic nose system based on a micro-machined gas sensor array to assess the freshness of sardines

An electronic nose system based on a four-element, integrated, micro-machined, metal oxide gas sensor array is used to assess, in an objective manner, the evolutionary stages of freshness in sardine samples stored up to 1-week at 4 °C. The sensors developed were based on tin oxide doped with Pt or Pd or Bi, and on tungsten oxide doped with Au. The selection of the gas sensitive materials was based on a previous identification and quantification of characteristic compounds found in the headspace of sardines determined by solid phase micro-extraction gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry. Principal component analysis performed on the responses of the sensor array revealed that sardine samples could be classified in three freshness states. This was in good agreement with the results of a microbiological analysis. A support vector machine-based classifier reached a 100% success rate in the identification of sardine freshness. The stability of the electronic nose classification ability was assessed by correctly classifying measurement databases gathered 1-month apart. By building and validating quantitative partial least squares models, which employed as input data the gas sensor responses, it was possible to predict with good accuracy the total viable counts (TVC) of aerobic bacteria present in sardine samples. For the validation dataset, the correlation coefficient between actual and predicted TVC was 0.91, which indicates that the electronic nose system developed is a simple and rapid technique for evaluating sardine freshness.