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Keywords: Dissolution profile comparison; Similarity factor f2; Bootstrap confidence interval; Bias correction.
In vitro dissolution profile has been shown to be correlated with the drug absorption and has often been considered as a metric for assessing in-vitro bioequivalence between a test product and corresponding reference one. Various methods have been developed to assess the similarity between two dissolution profiles. In particular, similarity factor f2 has been reviewed and discussed extensively in many statistical articles. Although the f2 lacks inferential statistical properties, the estimation of f2 and its various modified versions were the most widely used metric for comparing dissolution profiles. In this paper, we investigated performances of the naive f2 estimate method, Bootstrap f2 confidence interval method and Bias Corrected-accelerated (BCa) Bootstrap f2 confidence interval method for comparing dissolution profiles. Our studies show that naive f2 estimate method and BCa Bootstrap f2 confidence interval method are unable to control the type I error rate. The Bootstrap f2 confidence interval method can control the type I error rate under a specific level. However, it will cause great conservatism on the power of the test. To solve the potential issues of the previous methods, we proposed a Bootstrap Bias Corrected (BC) f2 confidence interval method in this paper. The type I error rate, power and sensitivity among different f2 methods were compared based on simulations. The proposed Bootstrap BC f2 confidence interval method shows better control of type I error than the naive f2 estimate method and BCa Bootstrap f2 confidence interval method. It also provides better power than the Bootstrap f2 confidence interval method.