Seeing Is Believing: Time-Lapse Macro-Imaging of Morphological Changes of Solid Dosages as a Teaching and Research Tool

Disintegration kinetics and behaviors are critical for the quality and performance of oral solid dosages. Instead of performing standard disintegration tests, herein, we aim to visualize these kinetic processes in real time.A visual acquisition system is developed to capture the morphological changes of tablets under static conditions via time-lapse macro-imaging. The system consists of: i) a customized quartz chamber, ii) a metal sieve with pore sizes ranging from 1 to 2 mm in diameter to allow rapid settling of the disintegrated particles, and iii) a temperature-controlled water bath. A typical workflow consists of the following steps: i) planning of the experiment to consider the type of the active pharmaceutical ingredient and drug release mechanism; ii) acquisition of photo-imaging data from at least two cameras arranged at different angles over a predetermined time period; iii) post-processing of the image data; iv) production of video clips and image analysis.Representative works are shown to demonstrate the disintegration phenomenon or the morphological changes of solid drug products of various controlled- and extended-release mechanisms.These video clips are used as teaching materials for students majoring in pharmacy or pharmaceutical chemistry, which also provide an insightful unique perspective of the microprocess during tablet fragmentation, disintegration or drug release.