Solid-phase spectrofluorimetric determination of acetylsalicylic acid and caffeine in pharmaceutical preparations using partial least-squares multivariate calibration.

PLS-1, a variant of the partial least-squares algorithm was used for the solid-phase spectrofluorimetric determination of acetylsalicylic acid (ASA) and caffeine (CF) in pharmaceutical formulations. The method allows the simultaneous quantification of the analytes, as the closely overlapping spectral bands are efficiently solved. Sample preparation prior to analysis is not required. The calibration set consisted of 83 samples with 50-170mgg(-1) ASA plus 5-20mgg(-1) CF; another set of 25 samples was used for external validation. Agreement between predicted and experimental concentrations was fair (r=0.987 and 0.974 for ASA and CF models). For both models, the prediction performance was evaluated in terms of the coefficient of variability (CV), relative predictive determination (RPD), and ratio error range (RER). The final PLS-1 models were used for the determination of ASA and CF in pharmaceutical formulations.