Classification of pharmaceutical solid excipients using self-organizing maps

Abstract

In pharmaceutical technology the study of rheological behavior of powders is an important step in pre formulation of solid dosage forms. These studies, particularly the flow behavior of powders, is an exhausting and very time consuming task, which requires tools that render this process faster while maintaining accuracy. The self-organizing map (SOM) is tool in the exploratory phase of data mining. It projects data from input space to low-dimensional regular grid which may be effectively utilized to visualize and explore properties of the data. This paper applies self-organizing map and K-means in order to analyze rheological characteristics of pharmaceutical solid excipients and their binary mixtures e.q. attapulgite, a natural clay candidate to solid excipient. Self-organizing map was able to classify effectively the excipients in ordered and coherent groups and classified attapulgite as a characteristic grouping having properties far distinct from the other groups of excipients. SOM enabled a reduction of experiments via exploratory data analysis about the rheological behavior of these powders. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.