MRI being applied to diffuse salt in Iberian ham

The salt content of ham delivers texture, flavor and is what allows the ham itself to mature, as it wouldn’t be able to do so without it; unless a team of researchers are able to diffuse salt non-destructively using MRI.

Data suggests that manufacturing a ham into one with a low salt content would put the chances of marketing it near to impossible because of it becoming physically ruined in the process. However, if this technique can work, it would become useful to the food industry when marketing it as a form of quality control.  

With this information, a team of researchers from the Meat and Meat Products Research Institute of the University of Extremadura set out to study salt diffusion in ham by MRI, computer vision and data mining and published their study in the Journal of Food Engineering.

The researchers monitored the diffusion of the ham as it matured using magnetic resonance, computer visualization and statistical calculus. This technique was useful in differentiating the images of various muscles and stages as the ham matured.