Bubbles in noodle dough: Characterization by X-ray microtomography

Innovations in nondestructive assessment of baked products: Current trends and future prospects

Rising consumer awareness, coupled with advances in sensor technology, is propelling the food manufacturing industry to innovate and employ tools that ensure the production of safe, nutritious, and environmentally sustainable products. Amidst a plethora of nondestructive techniques available for evaluating the quality attributes of both raw and processed foods, the challenge lies in determining the most fitting solution for diverse products, given that each method possesses its unique strengths and limitations. This comprehensive review focuses on baked goods, wherein we delve into recently published literature on cutting-edge nondestructive methods to assess their feasibility for Industry 4.0 implementation. Emphasizing the need for quality control modalities that align with consumer expectations regarding sensory traits such as texture, flavor, appearance, and nutritional content, the review explores an array of advanced methodologies, including hyperspectral imaging, magnetic resonance imaging, terahertz, acoustics, ultrasound, X-ray systems, and infrared spectroscopy. By elucidating the principles, applications, and impacts of these techniques on the quality of baked goods, the review provides a thorough synthesis of the most current published studies and industry practices. It highlights how these methodologies enable defect detection, nutritional content prediction, texture evaluation, shelf-life forecasting, and real-time monitoring of baking processes. Additionally, the review addresses the inherent challenges these nondestructive techniques face, ranging from cost considerations to calibration, standardization, and the industry's overreliance on big data.

Non-Destructive Assessment of Microstructural Changes in Kabuli Chickpeas during Storage

The potential of hyperspectral imaging (HSI) and synchrotron phase-contrast micro computed tomography (SR-µCT) was evaluated to determine changes in chickpea quality during storage. Chickpea samples were stored for 16 wk at different combinations of moisture contents (MC of 9%, 11%, 13%, and 15% wet basis) and temperatures (10 °C, 20 °C, and 30 °C). Hyperspectral imaging was utilized to investigate the overall quality deterioration, and SR-µCT was used to study the microstructural changes during storage. Principal component analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) were used as multivariate data analysis approaches for HSI data. Principal component analysis successfully grouped the samples based on relative humidity (RH) and storage temperatures, and the PLS-DA classification also resulted in reliable accuracy (between 80 and 99%) for RH-based and temperature-based classification. The SR-µCT results revealed that microstructural changes in kernels (9% and 15% MC) were dominant at higher temperatures (above 20 °C) as compared to lower temperatures (10 °C) during storage due to accelerated spoilage at higher temperatures (above 20 °C). Chickpeas which had internal irregularities like cracked endosperm and air spaces before storage were spoiled at lower moisture from 8 wk of storage.

The effects of wheat cultivar, flour particle size and bran content on the rheology and microstructure of dough and the texture of whole wheat breads and noodles

The rheological properties and microstructure of doughs, and the texture properties of whole wheat breads and noodles were investigated. The gluten strength of doughs were discriminated due to wheat cultivar. Reduced flour particle size led to the doughs with a stronger gluten strength (i.e., smaller C2), lower degree of starch retrogradation (i.e., smaller C5), and longer relaxation time (i.e., larger n values). Firmer crumb of breads were prepared by flours with smaller particle size. With increased bran content, the gluten strength of dough weakened (i.e., increased C2), the development and relaxation time of dough and the degree of starch retrogradation decreased (i.e., decreased C1 time, n values and C5), the dough structure became more porous, and the product texture appeared to be firmer. As such, outcomes from this research will provide a practical guidance for the bakery industry to improve the consumer acceptability of whole wheat products.

Synchrotron tomography applications in agriculture and food sciences research: a review

Synchrotron imaging is widely used for research in many scientific disciplines. This article introduces the characteristics of synchrotron X-ray imaging and its applications in agriculture and food science research. The agriculture and food sector are a vast area that comprises of plants, seeds, animals, food and their products; soils with thriving microbial communities; and natural resources such as water, fertilizers, and organic matter. These entities have unique internal features, structures and compositions which differentiate them from each other in varieties, species, grades, and types. The use of a bright and tuneable monochromatic source of synchrotron imaging techniques enables researchers to study the internal features and compositions of plants, seeds, soil and food in a quick and non-destructive way to enhance their use, conservation and productivity. Synchrotron's different X-ray imaging techniques offer a wide domain of applications, which make them perfect to enhance the understanding of structures of raw and processed food products to promote food safety and security. Therefore, this paper summarizes the results of major experiments carried out with seeds, plants, soil, food and relevant areas of agricultural sciences with more emphasis on two synchrotron X-ray imaging techniques: absorption and phase-contrast imaging and computed tomography.

Multithreaded two-pass connected components labelling and particle analysis in ImageJ

Sequential region labelling, also known as connected components labelling, is a standard image segmentation problem that joins contiguous foreground pixels into blobs. Despite its long development history and widespread use across diverse domains such as bone biology, materials science and geology, connected components labelling can still form a bottleneck in image processing pipelines. Here, I describe a multithreaded implementation of classical two-pass sequential region labelling and introduce an efficient collision resolution step, 'bucket fountain'. Code was validated on test images and against commercial software (Avizo). It was performance tested on images from 2 MB (161 particles) to 6.5 GB (437 508 particles) to determine whether theoretical linear scaling (O(n)) had been achieved, and on 1-40 CPU threads to measure speed improvements due to multithreading. The new implementation achieves linear scaling (b = 0.905-1.052, time ∝ pixelsb ; R 2 = 0.985-0.996), which improves with increasing thread number up to 8-16 threads, suggesting that it is memory bandwidth limited. This new implementation of sequential region labelling reduces the time required from hours to a few tens of seconds for images of several GB, and is limited only by hardware scale. It is available open source and free of charge in BoneJ.

X-Ray microtomography imaging of red lentil puffed snacks: Processing conditions, microstructure and texture

Red lentils have a great potential to be used as healthy ingredients in puffed snacks due to their excellent nutritional qualities. However, these types of ingredients with relatively higher protein and fiber content when compared to ingredients that are typically used for the manufacture of puffed foods (e.g., refined cereal flours/starches) result in inferior textural quality. Extrusion processing parameters such as screw speed, moisture content and injection pressure of a blowing agent can be manipulated to optimize the microstructure of an extrudate, and as a consequence the texture of the final puffed product. In this study, X-Ray microtomography imaging is used to characterize and quantify the detailed microstructure of red lentil extrudates. The results indicate that an increase in the injected pressure of the physical blowing agent could be correlated with a decrease in mean cell size and wall thickness, as well as an increase in the number of cells. Evidence of wall rupture with an increased screw speed is also visible, and that effect can be counterbalanced by a higher moisture content during processing. A large variation of the cell wall thickness inside an extrudate (which can induce a weaker cellular structure) as well as a larger cell size and higher amount of wall rupture, significantly reduce the hardness of extrudates. This novel effort to quantitatively characterize the microstructure of red lentil extrudates using X-Ray microtomography establishes that an optimal product texture could, in principle, be achieved by manipulating extrusion parameters to achieve the perfect snack texture.

The effects of sodium reduction on the gas phase of bread doughs using synchrotron X-ray microtomography

Globally, the bakery industry has a target of reducing sodium content in bread products. However, removing salt results in changes in the quality of bread through effects on dough's gas phase during the breadmaking process. Using synchrotron X-ray microtomography, the objective of this study was to investigate how sodium reduction induced changes in the gas phase parameters (i.e., gas volume fraction, bubble size distribution (BSD) and its time evolution) of non-yeasted doughs made from a wide range of formulations (i.e., wheat cultivar and water content) prepared with different mixing times. As salt content was reduced, a lower gas volume was retained in the dough by the end of mixing. Less gas bubbles were also retained if doughs were prepared from a stronger wheat cultivar, higher water content, and/or mixed for a shorter time. Rates of change in the median (R₀) and the width (ε) of the fitted lognormal radius dependence of bubble volume fraction [BVF(R)] indicated that reduced sodium content permitted disproportionation to proceed more rapidly. Higher water content or longer mixing time also resulted in faster disproportionation, indicating that water content and mixing time can be manipulated as a means of increasing bubble stability against disproportionation during low-sodium breadmaking. An examination of relative changes in dough's gas phase parameters arising from sodium reduction demonstrated that wheat cultivar, water content and mixing time all affected dough's tolerance to sodium reduction. Therefore, attainment of good bread crumb cell structure in low-sodium bread formulas is a function of salt's effects on dough rheology in addition to its effect on yeast activity, so that dough formulation and mixing conditions also need to be considered.