Determination of fat in live farmed Atlantic salmon using non-invasive NIR techniques

Non-destructive near-infrared (NIR) measurements were performed on 100 live, anaesthetised farmed Atlantic salmon, whole weight 1–11 kg, using two different NIR instruments: a grating monochromator instrument equipped with a fibre optic interactance probe, and a diode array instrument measuring diffuse reflectance in a non-contact mode. Crude fat content was determined using partial least squares (PLS) regression. Full cross-validation was used to evaluate the performance of the calibration models, expressed as the root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP). For the fibre optic instrument the wavelength range from 800 to 1098 nm resulted in a correlation coefficient of 0.90 and an RMSEP equal to 14 g kg−1 fat. The diode array instrument using the wavelength range from 900 to 1700 nm gave results of the same accuracy. The measurement times were 21 and 3 s respectively. It is concluded that either instrument could be used to determine the crude fat content in live Atlantic salmon, with good accuracy. © 2003 Society of Chemical Industry