Journal article
An open-source smartphone app for the quantitative evaluation of thin-layer chromatographic analyses in medicine quality screening
- Abstract:
- Substandard and falsified medicines present a serious threat to public health. Simple, low-cost screening tools are important in the identification of such products in low- and middle-income countries. In the present study, a smartphone-based imaging software was developed for the quantification of thin-layer chromatographic (TLC) analyses. A performance evaluation of this tool in the TLC analysis of 14 active pharmaceutical ingredients according to the procedures of the Global Pharma Health Fund (GPHF) Minilab was carried out, following international guidelines and assessing accuracy, repeatability, intermediate precision, specificity, linearity, range and robustness of the method. Relative standard deviations of 2.79% and 4.46% between individual measurements were observed in the assessments of repeatability and intermediate precision, respectively. Small deliberate variations of the conditions hardly affected the results. A locally producible wooden box was designed which ensures TLC photography under standardized conditions and shielding from ambient light. Photography and image analysis were carried out with a low-cost Android-based smartphone. The app allows to share TLC photos and quantification results using messaging apps, e-mail, cable or Bluetooth connections, or to upload them to a cloud. The app is available free of charge as General Public License (GPL) open-source software, and interested individuals or organizations are welcome to use and/or to further improve this software.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 3.4MB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41598-022-17527-y
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Scientific Reports More from this journal
- Volume:
- 12
- Article number:
- 13433
- Publication date:
- 2022-08-04
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-07-26
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
2045-2322
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1279122
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1279122
- Deposit date:
-
2022-09-16
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Hauk et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record