Patent ID: 8563934

Claim:
A method for aflatoxin detection using fluorescence spectral images, comprising the steps of: introducing target material before an ultraviolet light source; exciting the target material with ultraviolet light from the ultraviolet light source; passing fluorescence generated by the ultraviolet light excitation of the target material through a focusing device and a wavelength splitting optical device; detecting wavelength split fluorescence from the focusing device and the wavelength splitting optical device with a spectral data acquisition device which generates fluorescence spectral image data from the wavelength split fluorescence; transferring the fluorescence spectral image data from the spectral data acquisition device to a computer analysis system; processing the fluorescence spectral image data with the computer analysis system, wherein the processing includes pre-processing the fluorescence spectral image data with the computer system, identifying pixels associated with the target material in the fluorescence spectral images, computing statistics of spectral features for each identified target material pixel, characterizing fluorescence spectral features of each identified target material pixel, identifying peak fluorescence and peak fluorescence shift features within the characterized fluorescence spectral features, identifying aflatoxin contaminated target material pixels based on identified peak fluorescence and identified peak fluorescence shift features, and quantifying aflatoxin contamination levels within the imaged target material based on identified peak fluorescence and identified peak fluorescence shift features and computed target material pixel statistics; and presenting the analyzed fluorescence spectral imaging data regarding target material aflatoxin contamination detection and quantification results in human-readable form.