METHOD FOR ANALYZING INTACT CAPSULES AND TABLETS BY NEAR-INFRARED REFLECTANCE SPECTROMETRY

The BEAST method, when used in conjunction with NIRS data at as few as one or two wavelengths, is able to quickly detect a wide variety of adulterants in capsules, obviating the need to open them for analysis. The ability of this technique to detect the absence of components that should be present as well as the presence of components that should be absent enables it even to signal the presence of adulterants that have no near-infrared absorption. The technique generally comprises the steps of obtaining spectra for a training set of unadulterated samples, representing each specturm as a point in a hyperspace, creating a number of training set replicates and a bootstrap replicate distribution, calculating the center of the bootstrap replicate distribution, obtaining a spectrum for an adulterated sample, transforming this spectrum into a point in hyperspace, and identifying the adulterated sample as abnormal based on a relationship between the adulterated sample's hyperspatial point and the bootstrap replicate distribution.