Simultaneous determination of three fluoroquinolones by linear sweep stripping voltammetry with the aid of chemometrics

A linear sweep stripping voltammetric (LSSV) method has been researched and developed for simultaneous quantitative determination of mixtures of three antibiotic drugs, ofloxacin, norfloxacin and ciprofloxacin. It relies on reductive reaction of the antibiotics at a mercury electrode in a Britton-Robinson buffer (pH 3.78). The voltammograms of these three compounds overlap strongly, and show non-linear character. Thus, it is difficult to analyse the compounds individually in their mixtures. In this work, chemometrics methods such as classical least squares (CLS), principal component regression (PCR), partial least squares (PLS) and radial basis function-artificial neural networks (RBF-ANN) were applied for the simultaneous determination of these compounds. The prediction performance of the calibration models constructed on the basis of these methods was compared. It was shown that satisfactory quantitative results were obtained with the use of the RBF-ANN calibration model relative prediction error (RPE_T) of 8.1% and an average recovery of 101%. This method is able to accommodate non-linear data quite well. The proposed analytical method based on LSSV was applied for the analysis of ofloxacin, norfloxacin and ciprofloxacin antibiotics in bird feedstuffs and their spiked samples, as well as in eye drops with satisfactory results.