Profiling of cocaine using ratios of GC-MS peaks.

ABSTRACT: Illicit cocaine seizures are often compared to each other by using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) data from cocaine alkaloid compounds to determine whether two specimens originate from the same production batch or not. This can provide intelligence or investigative information at the early stages of an investigation or evidence in court. Traditional classification methods assume high stability of all alkaloids, use all of them to calculate the correlation between two profiles and use a threshold to classify samples. Unstable alkaloids will have a strong influence on the performance. We show that comparing each alkaloid target compound individually improves the classification. Unfortunately, it requires normalization and is also sensitive to the stability. Instead we suggest t

SUBMITTER: Villesen P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5599637 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature