Expert Chemometrics Made Even Easier

Symbion Systems, Inc. has announced the release of Symbion QT, Version 2.0. The new version features a number of advances over the original release of QT announced a year ago. These include an expanded user interface and an enhanced optimization feature.

The user interface further enhances the ease of use inherent in QT’s basic design by providing automatic selection of training, validation, and test data sets and by automatically populating the constituent matrix. A key feature of the enhanced optimizer is the automatic pre-filtering of spectral regions.

In common with the original version of Symbion QT, the new version provides the full capability of modern chemometrics without requiring specialized training. The QT Model Builder employs a step by step workflow approach which guides beginner and expert alike through the process of assembling the data needed to build and evaluate calibrations.

The resulting calibrations are fully validated and documented and ready for deployment. The workflow approach is based directly on the way that expert chemometricians handle these tasks. The entire QT package has been developed from the ground up to provide a completely natural, non-intrusive development environment which frees the user to focus directly on meeting project requirements without worrying about menu trees, keystroke sequences, or software syntax.

“In developing Symbion QT, we took the viewpoint of the intelligent, but non-specialist user,” said Dr. Michael A. Power, Director of Software Development at Symbion Systems. “We placed the chemometrics engine in the background and focused on the logical steps needed to acquire and process analytical data and to use it to produce calibrations which deliver validated results. Symbion QT guides the user through model development in a natural, efficient manner. It begins with overall data assembly followed by rapid and flexible designation of training, test, and validation sets. It continues through the choice of preprocessing and analysis routines, and the analysis and validation of prediction results. A full set of visualization tools is available to illuminate each step of the process.”

Symbion QT is the newest member of Symbion’s expanding line of software products for laboratory and process analysis. Symbion DX and RX provide a comprehensive capability for analytical process development.

The latest version of these products, Version 2.5, preserves all of the advanced features of earlier versions while adding several new capabilities, including a significantly expanded database functionality inherent in the use of a standard Oracle™ database. The result is a true universal “Spectroscopic Data System” for use in LIMS, pharmaceutical PAT (Process Analytical Technology) development, and on-line chemical process monitoring - in essence, closing the loop in Quality by Design (QbD). In addition, Symbion RTM provides a very rapid deployment capability which can provide thirty or more simultaneous predictions per second by using multithreaded data processing.

In summary, the Symbion family of software products provides a standardized platform for controlling a wide range of spectrometers and other analytical instruments. In addition, it provides comprehensive data manipulation and chemical development capabilities as well as the ability to communicate with numerous chemometric routines, other third party programs, and enterprise-wide data systems.

Symbion also provides comprehensive multi-instrument analytical capability within a single program, eliminating the need to train operators and analysts on a variety of different software platforms. Symbion RTM allows all of these capabilities to be deployed continuously on-line in a secure, locked-down package, enabling the control of all analytical functions within a unit operation.