Investigation of Size and Morphology of Chitosan Nanoparticles Used in Drug Delivery System Employing Chemometric Technique

The polymeric nanoparticles are prepared from biocompatible polymers in size between 10-1000 nm. Chitosan is a biocompatible polymer that - can be utilized as drug delivery systems. In this study, chitosan nanoparticles were synthesized using an optimized spontaneous emulsification method. Determining particle size and morphology are two critical parameters in nanotechnology. The aim of this study is to introduce methodology based on relation between particle size and ِِdiffuse reflectance infrared fourier transform (DRIFT) spectroscopy technique. Partial least squares (PLS) technique was used to estimate the average particle size based on DRIFT spectra. Forty two different chitosan nanoparticle samples with different particle sizes were analyzed using DRIFT spectrometry and the obtained data were processed by PLS. Results obtained from the real samples were compared to those obtained using field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM) as a reference method. It was observed that PLS could correctly predict the average particle size of synthesized sample. Nanoparticles and their morphological state were determined by FE-SEM. Based on morphological characteristics analyzing with proposed method the samples were separated into two groups of "appropriate" and "inappropriate". Chemometrics methods such as principal component analysis, cluster analysis (CA) and linear discriminate analysis (LDA) were used to classify chitosan nanoparticles in terms of morphology. The percent of correctly classified samples using LDA were 100 %and 90% for training and test sets, respectively.