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Integral Calculus

Integration is the reverse of differentiation. With differentiation breaking a process down to look at the instantaneous process, integration sums up the information from small time intervals to give a total result over a larger time period.

One example of this is the area under the plasma concentration time curve. Later we shall learn that this summation or integration process can be used to evaluate dosage forms, that is it can be used as a measure of performance.

Using integral calculus we can go in the reverse direction. In the section above we converted from the rate of change equation to an equation for X. We can also go further and get an area under the curve, which is a further integration.

Another example is the progression from distance, to speed (the rate of change of distance), to acceleration (the rate of change of speed).


This page was last modified: 12 February 2001

Copyright 2001 David W.A. Bourne


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