Physics Commons^™

Automated Peak Identification For Time -Of -Flight Mass Spectroscopy, Haijian Chen

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The high throughput capabilities of protein mass fingerprints measurements have made mass spectrometry one of the standard tools for proteomic research, such as biomarker discovery. However, the analysis of large raw data sets produced by the time-of-flight (TOF) spectrometers creates a bottleneck in the discovery process. One specific challenge is the preprocessing and identification of mass peaks corresponding to important biological molecules. The accuracy of mass assignment is another limitation when comparing mass fingerprints with databases.;We have developed an automated peak picking algorithm based on a maximum likelihood approach that effectively and efficiently detects peaks in a time-of-flight secondary ion …