Artificial neural network assisted kinetic spectrophotometric technique for simultaneous determination of paracetamol and p-aminophenol in pharmaceutical samples using localized surface plasmon resonance band of silver nanoparticles

•Simple and accurate methods for simultaneous determination PAC and PAP.•The LSPR of Ag-NPs is used for analytes determination.•Chemometric methods are combined with spectrophotometry for simul. deter.•The results of analysis of these drugs by FFNN and RBFN is compared.

Spectrophotometric analysis method based on the combination of the principal component analysis (PCA) with the feed-forward neural network (FFNN) and the radial basis function network (RBFN) was proposed for the simultaneous determination of paracetamol (PAC) and p-aminophenol (PAP). This technique relies on the difference between the kinetic rates of the reactions between analytes and silver nitrate as the oxidizing agent in the presence of polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) which is the stabilizer. The reactions are monitored at the analytical wavelength of 420 nm of the localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) band of the formed silver nanoparticles (Ag-NPs). Under the optimized conditions, the linear calibration graphs were obtained in the concentration range of 0.122–2.425 μg mL−1 for PAC and 0.021–5.245 μg mL−1 for PAP. The limit of detection in terms of standard approach (LODSA) and upper limit approach (LODULA) were calculated to be 0.027 and 0.032 μg mL−1 for PAC and 0.006 and 0.009 μg mL−1 for PAP. The important parameters were optimized for the artificial neural network (ANN) models. Statistical parameters indicated that the ability of the both methods is comparable. The proposed method was successfully applied to the simultaneous determination of PAC and PAP in pharmaceutical preparations.

Graphical abstractReduction of the silver ions by the analytes.Figure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload as PowerPoint slide