Quality Evaluation of Raw Moutan Cortex Using the AHP and Gray Correlation-TOPSIS Method

BACKGROUND Raw Moutan cortex (RMC) is an important Chinese herbal medicine. Comprehensive and objective quality evaluation of Chinese herbal medicine has been one of the most important issues in the modern herbs development. OBJECTIVE To evaluate and compare the quality of RMC using the weighted gray correlation- Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method. MATERIALS AND METHODS The percentage composition of gallic acid, catechin, oxypaeoniflorin, paeoniflorin, quercetin, benzoylpaeoniflorin, paeonol in different batches of RMC was determined, and then adopting MATLAB programming to construct the gray correlation-TOPSIS assessment model for quality evaluation of RMC. RESULTS The quality evaluation results of model evaluation and objective evaluation were consistent, reliable, and stable. CONCLUSION The model of gray correlation-TOPSIS can be well applied to the quality evaluation of traditional Chinese medicine with multiple components and has broad prospect in application. SUMMARY The experiment tries to construct a model to evaluate the quality of RMC using the weighted gray correlation- Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method. Results show the model is reliable and provide a feasible way in evaluating quality of traditional Chinese medicine with multiple components.