Noncompartmental Analysis (R Track)

A computational, audit-minded workflow for running NCA in R: structure → compute → diagnose → report

A computational, audit-minded workflow for running NCA in R: define profiles, choose intervals, compute exposure metrics, diagnose reliability, and produce report-ready tables.

Welcome

Noncompartmental Analysis (R Track) is a hands-on module for clinical pharmacologists, pharmacometricians, and quantitative scientists who need to run NCA in a way that is fast, reproducible, and defensible.

The focus isn’t just how to compute AUC — it’s how to run NCA like an audit-minded PMx scientist:

  • define what a “profile” is (and what breaks it)
  • choose intervals intentionally (0–T, 0–tau, 0–inf, partial AUC windows)
  • compute exposure metrics with transparent assumptions
  • diagnose reliability so results are trustworthy
  • produce clean tables and figures you can drop into a report

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Who this module is for

  • Clinical pharmacologists running exposure summaries in early studies
  • Pharmacometrics scientists who need defensible NCA workflows
  • Analysts producing report-ready AUC/Cmax/Tmax tables
  • Scientists who want to stop “click-and-export” NCA and make it reproducible
  • Anyone who has ever wondered: “Are these NCA results actually valid?”

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

  • Explain what NCA is (and isn’t) within PMx workflows
  • Define what counts as one PK profile (ID + occasion/analyte/matrix when needed)
  • Build PKNCAconc(), PKNCAdose(), and PKNCAdata() objects correctly
  • Define exposure intervals deliberately (partial AUC windows, AUC over tau, AUCinf)
  • Run pk.nca() and extract results into clean, report-ready tables
  • Diagnose reliability using practical checks (extrapolated fraction, half-life sanity checks, visual QC)
  • Handle BLQ and missingness transparently and consistently
  • Spot the common structural failure modes that silently break NCA

Course structure

This module is organized as a repeatable workflow you can reuse on any study:

  1. Structure → define profiles, validate uniqueness, confirm units and sorting
  2. Compute → build PKNCA objects, define intervals, run pk.nca()
  3. Diagnose → reliability checks (terminal phase, AUCinf extrapolation, visual QC)
  4. Report → clean summary tables + reproducible plots for communication

After the final lesson, you’ll reach a Course Completion page where you can confirm completion and generate your certificate.


Tools used

  • R (≥ 4.2 recommended)
  • RStudio or Positron
  • tidyverse
  • PKNCA

Get started

Begin with NCA Foundations and complete the structural QC checklist before computing any exposure metrics.