Optimisation of a new headspace mass spectrometry instrument

A fast head-space analysis instrument, constituted by an automatic sample introduction system directly coupled to a mass detector without performing any chromatographic separation, was assembled. A suitable and original response was computed to optimise, by experimental design, the measured signals for discrimination purposes. The volatile fractions of 105 extra virgin olive oils coming from five different Mediterranean areas were analysed. The rough information collected by this system was unravelled and explained by well-known chemometrical techniques of display (principal component analysis), feature selection (stepwise linear discriminant analysis) and classification (linear discriminant analysis). The 93.4% of samples resulted to be correctly classified and the 90.5% correctly predicted by cross-validation procedure, whilst the 80.0% of an external test set, created to full validate the classification rule, were correctly assigned.