Peak pattern variations related to comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography acquisition

Identifying compounds of interest for peaks in data generated by comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC ×  GC) is a critical analytical task. Manually identifying compounds is tedious and time-consuming. An alternative is to use pattern matching. Pattern matching identifies compounds by matching previously observed patterns with known peaks to newly observed patterns with unidentified peaks. The fundamental difficulty of pattern matching comes from peak pattern distortions that are caused by differences in data acquisition conditions. This paper investigates peak pattern variations related to varying oven temperature ramp rate and inlet gas pressure and evaluates two types of affine transformations for matching peak patterns. The experimental results suggest that, over the experimental ranges, the changes in temperature ramp rate generate non-linear pattern variations and changes in gas pressure generate nearly linear pattern variations. The results indicate the affine transformations can largely remove the pattern variations and can be used for applications such as pattern matching and normalizing retention times to retention indices.