Empower Tip: QDa MS Data in Empower

In this tip, we will learn about smoothing chromatograms.

Let’s see how it’s done!

Without any smoothing, we see the signal-to-noise ratio of our peak of interest is 29:1.

Go to the Results window within Review. We see the height, and signal-to-noise ratio in the Peaks table and the peak-to-peak noise in the Chromatogram Result table, which is 33659.

Go to the Smoothing/Offset tab of the Processing Method. We can apply a small amount of smoothing, in this example a smoothing level of 9.

Reprocessing the data we see the signal-to-noise ratio is now 42.5:1.

Returning to the Results window within Review, we see about a 1% reduction in peak height and a significant reduction in peak-to-peak noise which is now 22715, resulting in an improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio.

NOTE: Savitzky-Golay smoothing averages data points. For more detailed information Google a book called Chromatographic Integration Methods by Norman Allen Dyson. There is a good section on filtering and smoothing chromatographic signals.

It’s that easy!