Detection of metabolites of trapped humans using ion mobility spectrometry coupled with gas chromatography.

For the first time, ion mobility spectrometry coupled with rapid gas chromatography, using multicapillary columns, was applied for the development of a pattern of signs of life for the localization of entrapped victims after disaster events (e.g., earthquake, terroristic attack). During a simulation experiment with entrapped volunteers, 12 human metabolites could be detected in the air of the void with sufficient sensitivity to enable a valid decision on the presence of a living person. Using a basic normalized summation of the measured concentrations, all volunteers involved in the particular experiments could be recognized only few minutes after they entered the simulation void and after less than 3 min of analysis time. An additional independent validation experiment enabled the recognition of a person in a room of ∼25 m(3) after ∼30 min with sufficiently high sensitivity to detect even a person briefly leaving the room. Undoubtedly, additional work must be done on analysis time and weight of the equipment, as well as on validation during real disaster events. However, the enormous potential of the method as a significantly helpful tool for search-and-rescue operations, in addition to trained canines, could be demonstrated.

Adaptive approach for variable noise suppression on laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy responses using stationary wavelet transform.

Spectral signals are often corrupted by noise during their acquisition and transmission. Signal processing refers to a variety of operations that can be carried out on measurements in order to enhance the quality of information. In this sense, signal denoising is used to reduce noise distortions while keeping alterations of the important signal features to a minimum. The minimization of noise is a highly critical task since, in many cases, there is no prior knowledge of the signal or of the noise. In the context of denoising, wavelet transformation has become a valuable tool. The present paper proposes a noise reduction technique for suppressing noise in laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) signals using wavelet transform. An extension of the Donoho's scheme, which uses a redundant form of wavelet transformation and an adaptive threshold estimation method, is suggested. Capabilities and results achieved on denoising processes of artificial signals and actual spectroscopic data, both corrupted by noise with changing intensities, are presented. In order to better consolidate the gains so far achieved by the proposed strategy, a comparison with alternative approaches, as well as with traditional techniques, is also made.

An approach to automated frequency-domain feature extraction in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

For the analysis of metabolite systems, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy has become an important quantitative monitoring technology. Automated quantitation methods are highly desired and mainly characterized by the tasks of model selection and parameter approximation. This paper proposes a promising automated two stage approach in the frequency-domain, in which signaling peaks are first identified and filtered from noise based on curvature properties of the spectrum, and then proportionally approximated based on the analytical solution of a Lorentz-function. Remarkably, in opposition to common least-squares approaches, the proposed approximation scheme does not rely on partial derivatives, and furthermore, the runtime is independent to the number of spectral datapoints. Simulations provide promising empirical evidence for successful peak selection and parameter approximation, with the results for the latter highly outperforming the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm in terms of error minimization and robustness.

A bottom-up approach to the biclustering-problem.

The biclustering problem adresses the discovery of locally significant correlation within a data matrix and has recently become quite popular in the field of microarray data analysis. The preservation of a particularly defined degree of homogeneity between elements within a bicluster plays a key role in the search procedure. This work proposes a pairwise distance function related to the mean squared residue to introduce multiple enrichment algorithms. Based on a theoretical framework, the impact is demonstrated empirically by the enrichment of commonly available and also on artificially generated bicluster sets.