Analysis of counterfeit pharmaceutical tablet cores utilizing macroscopic infrared spectroscopy and infrared spectroscopic imaging.

Advantages and limitations of analyzing authentic and counterfeit pharmaceutical tablets with both macro (nonimaging) attenuated total internal reflection Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FT-IR) spectroscopy and micro ATR-FT-IR spectroscopic imaging have been evaluated. The results of this study demonstrated that micro ATR imaging was more effective for extracting formulation information (sourcing), whereas a macro ATR approach was better suited for counterfeit detection (screening). More importantly, this study demonstrated that a thorough analysis of the counterfeit core can be achieved by combining the results of both techniques.