Graduate Student Literature Review: A review on near-infrared spectroscopy for rapid detection of hazardous substances in milk and dairy products

Milk and dairy products are highly valued for their nutritional content, making their quality and safety critically important. However, they are prone to contamination by hazardous substances, such as veterinary drug residues, adulterants, and foodborne pathogens, which pose serious risks to consumer health. While traditional detection methods are effective, they often involve complex, time-consuming procedures, labor-intensive sample preparation, and high costs. In contrast, near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) has emerged as a promising alternative for dairy quality and safety testing, offering the benefits of being rapid, nondestructive, easy to operate, and cost effective. This paper provides a detailed overview of the principles, methodologies, and analytical processes of NIRS in detecting hazardous substances in milk and dairy products. The chemometric techniques involved in data preprocessing, characteristic wavelength selection, and model construction are systematically introduced. The paper also highlights recent research advancements in the detection of 3 major categories of hazardous substances (veterinary drug residues, adulterants, and foodborne pathogens) using NIRS technology. Presently, NIRS-based detection remains constrained by unresolved challenges: ambiguous optical detection mechanisms, inadequate sensitivity for trace-level analyte detection, pronounced interference from complex matrices, and suboptimal model robustness and generalizability. Moving forward, research endeavors should prioritize the seamless integration of frontier technologies, encompassing optical mechanism elucidation, signal enrichment enhancement, deep learning, multimodal analysis, and artificial intelligence. Such integration is anticipated to substantially boost the detection performance of NIRS, alongside enhancing model robustness and generalizability, thus furnishing theoretical underpinnings and technical scaffolding for the rapid detection and analysis of hazardous substances in milk and dairy products.