Using Edge Pattern Matching for Automatic Chemical Identification in GCXGC

摘要

Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GCxGC) is a new technology for chemical separation. In GCxGC analysis, chemical identification is a critical task that can be performed by peak pattern matching. Peak pattern matching tries to identify the chemicals by establishing correspondences from the known peaks in a peak template to the unknown peaks in a target peak pattern. After the correspondences are established, information carried by known peaks are copied into the unknown peaks. The peaks in the target peak pattern are then identified. Using peak locations as the matching features, peak patterns can be represented as point patterns and the peak pattern matching problem becomes a point pattern matching problem. In GCxGC, the chemical separation process imposes an ordering constraint on peak retention time (peak location). Based on the ordering constraint, the matching technique proposed in this paper forms directed edge patterns from point patterns and then matches the point patterns by matching the edge patterns. Preliminary experiments on GCxGC peak patterns suggest that matching the edge patterns is much more efficient than matching the corresponding point patterns.