Determination of the number of exponential functions in pharmacokinetic models on the basis of concentration-time data by MUCOM1.

MUCOM1 is a new BASIC computer program which has been developed for automatically deriving the function terms of a pharmacokinetic model, operating on the best-approximation principle. The parameters of a poly-exponential model and their confidence intervals are computed from any available concentration-time data. The user neither needs to make an initial estimate of the number of terms, nor to find first approximations to the coefficients of the exponential functions. The approximation procedure is iterative, and is based on the RIP routine. MUCOM1 can be used on desk computers.