Facile and sensitive multi quantitative determination of tamsulosin and dutasteride in commercial tablet based on citrate-capped gold nanoparticles along with smart chemometrics-assisted spectrophotometric methods

In this work, a simple colorimetric method based on the gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) using its localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) was proposed for the simultaneous determination of tamsulosin (TAM) and dutasteride (DTS) in pharmaceutical formulation. The aggregation of citrate-capped AuNPs was observed in the presence of TAM and DTS, which led to a change in color from red to gray. Also, the absorbance was shifted from 524 to 674 nm. The formation and size of synthesized AuNPs before and after aggregation were evaluated by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and dynamic light scattering (DLS), which were found to be 11.49 and 122.1 nm, respectively. The colorimetric method was validated in the concentration range of 50–200 μg/L, where it revealed good linearity ( R 2 = 0.9958 for TAM and R 2 = 0.9912 for DTS). The limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantitation (LOQ) were found to be 21.08, 21.82 μg/L and 63.90, 66.12 μg/L for TAM and DTS, respectively. Radial basis function neural network (RBF-NN) and fuzzy inference system (FIS) were coupled with this approach for the simultaneous estimation of both components. The mean recovery percentage of the RBF model was higher than 99.99% for both components, as well as root mean square error (RMSE) values were 3.69 × 10 −13 and 1.75 × 10 −13 for TAM and DTS, respectively. In the FIS model, the mean recovery was 99.15% and 101.76% for TAM and DTS, respectively, while RMSE was lower than 3.2. These methods were compared with high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) through an analysis of variance (ANOVA) test. This colorimetric method can be an appropriate choice for the determination of drug contents in pharmaceutical and biological samples.