Empower Tip: Exception Focused Review

In this tip for Empower Chromatography Data System (CDS), we will continue our series on Exception Focused Review.

In this tip, we will discuss manual integration.

The use of manual integration is a concern in some laboratories. There are a couple of ways to determine if manual integration has been done.

The Int Type field found in the Peaks table within Review tells us how a peak has been integrated. There are numerous integration types which can be found in the Empower on-line help. If both letters are ‘upper case’, then the integration was done as per the Integration tab of the Processing Method.

If one or both letters are ‘lower case’, then manual integration was done.

You can create a View Filter on the Peaks tab of the project window to look for any manually integrated peaks in your results.

A peak Custom Field, data type Boolean can be created to indicate if a peak has been manually integrated. If the peak has been manually integrated, the Custom Field will return ‘Manual Integration’. If not, it will return a ‘blank’ field.

The equation is too large to be viewed in the properties of the Custom Field, therefore, I have included it below to view it in its entirety.

Back to the example from Step 2, you now see ‘Manual Integration’ in the field for the first peak.

An alternate method is to create a peak Custom Field, data type Boolean which returns a ‘1’ for manually integrated peaks and a ‘0’ for the rest. The outcome of this field can be incorporated into a Result field which follows.

The result Custom Field, data type Boolean will return Manual Integration for the entire Result if one or more peaks have been manually integrated. Otherwise, the field will be ‘blank’.

Back to our example, you see the peak field flags the manually integrated peak and the overall Result is flagged.

This field can be included in a Report Method to alert the reader that manual integration was done.

It’s that easy!

Final Notes This can be done with either the Pro or QuickStart interface.