Evaluation of dissolution profiles using principal component analysis

The performance of principal component analysis (PCA) for the evaluation of dissolution profiles is examined and compared with other methods such as the similarity factor and the calculation of the area under the curve. Both simulated and real data from the pharmaceutical industry are used. The PCA scores plots of the dissolution curves provide information about the between- and within-batch variations. Differences in level or shape can be observed in the first two principal components (PCs). Irrelevant irregularities, which have a strong influence on the similarity factor, are neglected in PC1/PC2. To detect outliers in a set of dissolution curves, PCA was preferred above Hotelling's T2 test. In general, PCA is found to be a useful technique to examine dissolution data visually, but however, it does not contain criteria to decide if batches are similar or not. This can be done by combining PCA with the resampling with replacement or bootstrap method to construct confidence limits.