Computer aided retrieval of common-batch members in Leuckart amphetamine profiling

Comparison of profiles is a well established way to find links between confiscated drugs. It is a laborious and time consuming task to manually compare large numbers of profiles to find common-batch links. To facilitate the comparison a computerized method has been developed. It is described and applied to a set of amphetamine impurity profiles. From each profile, areas of selected peaks are fed to the computer. By using quotients of corresponding peaks, the computer finds pairs of closely related profiles. With a sufficient numbers of peaks, the method is tolerant to variations in intensity between profiles, random peak area variations and a few strongly deviating peak areas. The program was written in Q-basic from Microsoft and may be run on any IBM-compatible personal computer. The method may also be used for analyzing data from other forensic objects, when the descriptors chosen are affected by errors like those described in the text.