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Background: It’s a long history for the use of herbal medicines to derive remedies in Chinese, and the popularity of herbal medicines has risen worldwide. It is necessary to assure the safety, efficacy and quality of herbal medicines by the corrected identification. Inner Mongolia Arnebia Radix is an important and historied used herbal medicine in Inner Mongolia.Methods: The methods of morphological characteristics and DNA barcoding was used to identify the plant origin of Inner Mongolia Arnebia Radix.Results: The identification results of morphological characteristics and DNA barcoding showed that the original plant of Inner Mongolia Arnebia Radix was Arnebia szechenyi, which was distinguished with Arnebia guttata, the official original plant of Inner Mongolia Arnebia Radix.Conclusions: We inferred that that the original plant of Inner Mongolia Arnebia Radix was Arnebia szechenyi.

Counterfeits in the medicine market make the authentication of snakes used for Chinese medicine a challenge to Chinese drug regulatory control agencies. This paper explores existing methods that can be used to quickly and accurately distinguish Zaocys (Z. dhumnades) from its counterfeits for routine identification of snake meats in food and drug control laboratories. In this research, the Cytochrome Oxidase I (COI) fragments of 51 samples from 17 species of snakes were amplified using Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and sequenced. The inter- and intra-specific variations of COI sequences were analyzed and compared based on Kimura-2-parameter (K-2P) distances; the minimal interspecific K-2P distance was 0.0934, which was bigger than the maximum intraspecific K-2P distance in Z. dhumnades (0.0523), indicating that Zaocys can be separated from its counterfeits. The Neighbor-Joining (N-J) tree of the snakes was constructed and the results show that snakes of the same species cluster with 100% bootstrap values. Since the Zaocys and its counterfeits are of different species, they can be distinguished using the N-J tree method. Another 10 samples of Zaocys from markets and drug stores were identified at the species level, among which 5 samples were proven to be the counterfeits--Ptyas korros.

This paper presents a new approach to content-based image retrieval by using dynamic indexing and guided search in a hierarchical structure, and extending data mining and data warehousing techniques. The proposed algorithms include: a wavelet-based scheme for multiple image feature extraction, the extension of a conventional data warehouse and an image database to an image data warehouse for dynamic image indexing, an image data schema for hierarchical image representation and dynamic image indexing, a statistically based feature selection scheme to achieve flexible similarity measures, and a feature component code to facilitate query processing and guide the search for the best matching. A series of case studies are reported, which include a wavelet-based image color hierarchy, classification of satellite images, tropical cyclone pattern recognition, and personal identification using multi-level palmprint and face features.© (2003) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.