Rapid discrimination of slimming capsules based on illegal additives by electronic nose and flash gas chromatography

The discrimination of counterfeit and/or illegally manufactured medicines is an important task in the pharmaceutical industry for pharmaceutical safety. In this study, 22 slimming capsule samples with illegally added sibutramine and phenolphthalein were analyzed by electronic nose and flash gas chromatography. To reveal the difference among the different classes of samples, principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis were employed to analyze the data acquired from electronic nose and flash gas chromatography, respectively. The samples without illegal additives can be discriminated from the ones with illegal additives by using electronic nose or flash gas chromatography data individually. To improve the performance of classification, a data fusion strategy was applied to integrate the data from electronic nose and flash gas chromatography data into a single model. The results show that the samples with phenolphthalein, sibutramine and both can be classified well by using fused data.