Automated alignment of one-dimensional chromatographic fingerprints

A general framework for the automatic alignment of one-dimensional chromatographic signals is presented in this article. The alignment of signals was achieved by explicitly modeling the warping function. Its shape was estimated using a linear combination of several B-spline functions. The coefficients of the spline functions were found in the course of an optimization procedure to maximize the Pearson's correlation coefficient between a target chromatogram and aligned chromatogram(s). The computational requirements of the method are discussed with respect to the correlation optimized warping method, frequently used for the alignment of chromatographic signals. As illustrated with two sets of one-dimensional chromatographic fingerprints, the automatic alignment approach performs well even when non-linear peak shifts need to be corrected. It can be applied in an on-the-fly manner since the alignment of signals is rapid.