ABSTRACT
The quality evaluation of traditional Chinese medicine is one of the key issues related to the modernization of traditional Chinese medicine. The quality evaluation technology system of traditional Chinese medicine mainly includes traditional evaluation (traits, microscopic and physicochemical identification), chemical evaluation and biological evaluation. Due to the complex composition of traditional Chinese medicine, the single detection method in the above evaluation technology system usually cannot obtain sufficient quality information. The multi-source information fusion strategy can organically integrate data from multiple analysis and detection technologies to obtain more comprehensive information of samples and improve the quality evaluation effect. At present, multi-source information fusion strategy has been widely used in the fields of military, industrial and food, and it is still in its infancy in the field of quality evaluation of traditional Chinese medicine. This research introduces the definition, structure, method (algorithm) and fusion level of multi-source information fusion, summarizes its research progress in the origin traceability, variety identification and pharmaceutical analysis of traditional Chinese medicine, and sorts out the specific methods of data fusion in each literature. Finally, we summarized, prospected and discussed the application, development and existing problems of information fusion technology and its application in the quality evaluation of traditional Chinese medicine, in order to provide reference for broadening the application of this technology in the field of traditional Chinese medicine.