Regular articleNon-invasive detection of medicines and edible products by direct measurement through vials using near-infrared spectroscopy: A review
Introduction
In the pharmaceutical and food industry, the final product is usually sealed in glass or plastic vials (materials include borosilicate, polyethylene, etc.) [1], [2]. The traditional inspection methods usually have to open the packages of samples, which cannot meet for the requirement of rapid detection, even contaminate samples and fails to obtain the accurate content of the component of its reaction with air [3]. Therefore, non-invasive detection is studied to overcome the impact of packaging materials, and will be an ideal quality control method for packaged medicines and edible products and replace the current common sampling inspection to prevent substandard medicines or edible products from pouring into the market [4]. Especially, the non-invasive detection technology can avoid the contact between the experimenter and the test sample, reduce the harm of some human toxic medicines (such as anti-tumor medicines [1]). Besides, the technical requirements are not high for the operator's experience and proficiency [5], and very suitable for the detection of air and moisture sensitive medicines like vaccines [3].
Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is a significant non-invasive detection approach of medicines and edible products [6]. The range of NIR (780–2500 nm) is located between visible light and mid-infrared region, which can provide the characteristic fingerprints related to the composition of tested objects based on the combinations and overtones peak of basic O-H, C-H, and N-H bond vibration [7], [8], [9]. And general plastics and glass absorb less NIR radiation, and the feature allows the medicines and edible products industry to use NIR spectroscopy technology to analyze samples in bottles [10]. From the perspective of measurement mode, NIR spectroscopy have been developed into three acquisition modes, including transmission, reflection and transflectance, which refer to the different geometric arrangements of the detected radiation beam, sample and the detection system used to collect analytical spectral information about the sample [11], [12]. From the perspective of analysis method, coupling with chemometrics is an intrinsic characteristic of any vibrational spectroscopic procedure [13]. The major reason is NIR spectra often carry abundant information, and most of the time, the information is dispersed all over the spectra [14], [15]. And these chemometrics methods can not only extract effective information from the spectra where the peak signal overlaps severely, but also can be employed to deduct or correct the spectral variation caused by experimental operation and environmental interference [16]. NIR spectra combined with chemometric methods in quality control of medicines and edible products can make the analysis results relatively rapid and accurate. For instance, Principal component analysis (PCA), multivariable linear regression (MLR), partial least-squares (PLS) and partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) are commonly used to establish quantitative and qualitative models in this field, respectively [17].
From the application point of view, the strengths of NIR spectroscopy are real-time, cost-efficient, direct and non-invasive compared with other chemical analysis methods of medicines and edible products, such as liquid chromatography [18], [19], liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry [20], [21] and capillary electrophoresis [22] etc. At present, in addition to NIR spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) have been also used for non-invasive detection of medicines and edible products [23], [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29], [30], [31], [32]. For example, spatially offset Raman spectroscopy (SORS) could correctly identify the raw pharmaceutical materials in clear plastic bags, paper bags and colored glass bottles [33], and time-domain NMR (TD-NMR) was employed to quickly detect olive oil and adulterated vegetable oil in intact original bottle [34]. Moreover, there are some visible (Vis)-NIR technology in non-invasive detection, which enlightens that visible light can also be applied in the quality control of medicines and edible products in a non-invasive way [2], [35], [36]. Compared with these technologies, the advantage of NIR spectroscopy is that it can quantitatively analyze the sample to be tested, the limit of detection (LOD) is very low [37], and the slight differences between the samples can be detected. For example, NIR spectra can not only distinguish different batches of oral liquids in complete vials, but also accurately detect milligram-level ingredients [38], and most of correlation coefficients between the predicted active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) and the values obtained by standard methods are more than 0.96. Unlike Raman spectra, NIR spectra is very sensitive to moisture, so it is more suitable for the determination of residual moisture content (RMC) in lyophilized powder. In fact, in the freeze-dried injection manufacturing industry, NIR spectroscopy has been applied as an alternative to the traditional Karl Fischer (KF) titration method to determine the RMC of the final product in a non-invasive way. [39]. Moreover, the technology is particularly suitable for the identification of “high quality” counterfeit medicines whose API meets the requirements only, because information about other substances present in the sample system is also included in NIR spectra as well as APIs [40]. Of course, the NIR method will meet many problems, such as the uncertainty of the bottle will affect the non-invasive detection of the NIR spectroscopy. There are differences in the diameter, color, position and angle of the bottle, and each factor has a different degree of influence [3], [6]. However, after the spectra are properly preprocessed, the collected NIR spectra show a good correlation with the sample content.
As far as we know, there are some reports that have reviewed NIR technique [41], [42], [43], [44], [45], but few reviews of NIR spectra regarding non-invasive detection for medicines and edible products. As mentioned above, we classify and summarize the objects of medicines and edible products, solid and liquid, transmission and reflection, quantitative and qualitative, and different modeling methods. The structural framework of this review is shown in Fig. 1. In addition, the experimental methods, data analysis and results used in these studies are described in detail, and the problems encountered in these studies and suggestions for improvement are summarized.
Section snippets
Non-invasive detection based on NIR spectra in medicines
Adulterated and unqualified medicines usually endanger people's health, which put forward higher requirements for non-invasive detection methods in the quality control of medicines [46], [47], [48], [49], [50]. The related studies have involved both of liquid-state and solid-state medicines commonly applied on clinical practice. The analytical methods are mainly based on the spectral properties of the medicines, and involve the aspects of production, storage and use. For instance, some fake,
Non-invasive detection based on NIR spectroscopy in edible products
In addition to medicines, NIR spectroscopy is also widely applied to noninvasive measurement of edible products such as beverage wines, edible oil, and dairy products [72], [73], [74], [75], [76], [77], [78], [79]. NIR spectra can be used in both content detection of active ingredients in edible products, and adulteration identification of edible products that cannot be easily determined by traditional detection methods, such as Kjeldahl digestion method for quality assurance of protein-based
Discussion
Quality control of edible products and medicines is the focus of public attention. Rapid and noninvasive detection method development is important to guarantee productions quality and public health. NIR spectroscopy has shown its potential to provide a noninvasive method for edible products and medicines testing. And related researches have been published and increasing rapidly. These studies show that NIR spectra are suitable for authenticity/qualitative identification and active ingredient
Conclusion
Based on the above, NIR spectroscopy is expected to be a quality assessment tool for medicines and edible products, whose non-invasive properties allow it to detect a range of samples in a short time, and it has extremely high sensitivity. The diversity of samples, the non-uniformity of vial thickness and diameter, and the uncertainty of measurement position are the main interferences directly through vial detection. The above-mentioned literatures proceed from different aspects and reduce
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant NO. 81774148, NO. 81973699); the Science and Technology Program of Tianjin, China (grant NOs.15PTCYSY00030 and 16ZXHLGX00170); the National Major Science and Technology Projects of China (grant number 2018ZX09201011).
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These authors contributed equally to this work.