Pharmaceutical & medical
AS GOOD AS A HUMAN EXAMINER... OR EVEN BETTER
Thanks to ongoing technological advances, more and more tasks can be automated with machine vision. A particularly challenging project was successfully completed at the pharmaceutical company Aspen Notre-Dame-De-Bondeville, where filled ampoules needed to be inspected for foreign objects. With the HALCON machine vision software from MVTec and the support of MVTec’s customer service team, quality assurance was brought to a higher level.
A
rtificial intelligence is becoming increasingly common in industrial settings and makes it possible to automate even more demanding tasks. Companies benefit from this
through significant efficiency gains in various areas. Machine vision is particularly well suited to this field, as large quantities of images are quickly available as training data in production environments. The pharmaceutical company Aspen, headquartered in Durban, South Africa, also saw an opportunity to benefit from the advantages of machine vision in combination with deep learning. The company, which operates in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry, also has sites in Europe, including Notre-Dame-de-Bondeville in France. There, the company weighs and mixes the components of the drug formula and fills them
into ampoules in a subsequent process. “Our goal was to automate the inspection of ampoules for possible foreign particles. Quality assurance of pharmaceutical products is extremely important. Therefore, it was essential that the new solution matched the detection rates of the previous process, which involved inspection by human operators, or ideally even surpassed them,” explains Mickael Denis, manager for Operationnel Vision Industrielle. Vincent Trombetta, automatic visual inspection expert at Aspen, continues: “It was clear that such a task could only be automated using deep learning technologies. For the implementation, which required a great deal of expertise, we relied on the consulting services of MVTec Software. Since the machine vision solution on the inspection machine had already been implemented with MVTec HALCON, it made sense to use the services directly from the manufacturer.”
SPECIAL CHALLENGES IN THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY At the Notre-Dame-de-Bondeville site, where the corresponding plant is located, the plastic ampoules are first produced, in this case blown, then filled, and finally sealed. Since all these activities are carried out in one machine, this process is very hygienic. Foreign bodies can hardly get into the ampoules. Nevertheless, this process takes place under clean room conditions to further minimise the risk of contamination. Due to the activities involved, this process is also referred to as BFS. The acronym stands for blow, fill, and seal.
Once the ampoules have been filled and sealed, they are transported to an inspection and packaging area. The ampoules and their contents are then checked for defects. Previously, this process involved employees picking up each ampoule individually and checking it from all sides to see if the ampoule and the fill level were OK and if there were any foreign objects in the liquid. The big challenge here is that the contents of the ampoules may contain bubbles which are very difficult to distinguish from foreign objects. The particles floating in the vials are not always easy to detect, even for inspectors. They may be located on the side, sink to the bottom, or be unclear due to the viscosity of the liquid. It is therefore understandable
48 January 2026 Instrumentation Monthly
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