Rapid identification of false peaks in the spectrum of Hadamard transform ion mobility spectrometry with inverse gating technique

Abstract

With the application of Hadamard transform (HT) technique, the signal to noise ratio of ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) has been improved significantly. Nevertheless, possibly due to the modulation defects, false peaks appear in the demultiplexed data and demonstrate similar features to those of the real signal peaks, which makes them hard to be discriminated. Facing this challenge, a novel method has been presented in this work and achieved the rapid identification of the false peaks in Hadamard multiplexing IMS. Simply by introducing the inverse gating technique to Hadamard multiplexing, the novel inverse Hadamard transform (IHT) method is developed. With the application of this novel method in IMS, most of the false peaks are changed to opposite to the real signal peaks, which makes them easy to be classified as the false peaks. Furthermore, with the help of the single “code” extended method, the amount of the false peaks in inverse Hadamard transform ion mobility spectrometry (IHT-IMS) decreases dramatically, and this makes the identification more accurate. The sample tests further demonstrate that the inverse Hadamard transform (IHT) method is an effective way to address the problem of rapid identification of the false peaks and upgrade the quality analysis of Hadamard multiplexing ion mobility spectrometry.