Peak purity assessment in liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry

Fixed-size moving window evolving factor analysis and base peak chromatograms have been used for peak purity detection in data generated with LC–MS. The two methods were evaluated with both real and simulated data and were found to be fast and complementary to each other. When a possibly impure peak is detected, it is suggested that further information can be obtained from local principal component analysis modelling and comparative mass chromatogram plots.