Abstract

A chemometric model for the simultaneous estimation of phenobarbitone and phenytoin sodium anticonvulsant tablets using the back-propagation neural network calibration has been presented. The use of calibration datasets constructed from the spectral data of pure components is proposed. The calibration sets were designed such that the concentrations were orthogonal and span the possible mixture space fairly evenly. Spectra of phenobarbitone and phenytoin sodium were recorded at several concentrations within their linear range and used to compute the calibration mixture between wavelengths 220 and 260 nm at an interval of 1 nm. The back-propagation neural network model was optimized using three different sets of calibration and monitoring data for the number of hidden sigmoid neurons. The calibration model was thoroughly evaluated at several concentration levels using spectra obtained for 95 synthetic binary mixtures prepared using orthogonal designs. The optimized model showed sufficient robustness even when the calibration sets were constructed from different sets of pure spectra of components. Although the components showed complete spectral overlap, the model could accurately estimate the drugs, with satisfactory precision and accuracy, in tablet dosage with no interference from excipients, as indicated by the recovery study results.