ATR Imaging of Pharmaceutical Tablets

In this application note by PerkinElmer, ATR imaging measurements of commercial pharmaceutical tablets are developed. This technique shows a major advance in state of the art pharmaceutical tablet imaging. It provides an improvement in achievable spatial resolution compared with NIR chemical imaging, and sharper, generally easier to interpret images. The technique overcomes the major limitation of direct diffuse reflectance imaging in the mid-IR, namely problems with high signal attenuation and uncontrolled specular reflectance contributions in the image. It also avoids some of the limitations of Raman imaging such as sample overheating, potential fluorescence, limited spatial resolution (depending on Raman hardware configuration) and relatively long image collection times.