'Seeing' the chemicals in pharmaceutical tablets with NIR chemical imaging

摘要

Product and process understanding in the pharmaceutical industry have increased in recent years with the advent of new technologies that gave access to new information. Near infrared chemical imaging is an advanced form of NIR spectroscopy, where a collection of tens of thousands of spectra are acquired at once using a NIR array detector to give insight into the chemical composition of powders and tablets. More importantly, this technology reveals the physical structure of the product or intermediate and this information is proving to be of great value in formulation development, trouble-shooting and counterfeit, sourcing, to give only a few examples. Inthis article, we discuss these popular applications with an emphasis on the novel information accessed with this technology.