Automated Gas Chromatography Peak Alignment: A Deep Learning Approach using Greedy Optimization and Simulation.

Abstract

The clinical significance of volatile organic compounds (VOC) in detecting diseases has been established over the past decades. Gas chromatography (GC) devices enable the measurement of these VOCs. Chromatographic peak alignment is one of the important yet challenging steps in analyzing chromatogram signals. Traditional semi-automated alignment algorithms require manual intervention by an operator which is slow, expensive and inconsistent. A pipeline is proposed to train a deep-learning model from artificial chromatograms simulated from a small, annotated dataset, and a postprocessing step based on greedy optimization to align the signals.Clinical Relevance- Breath VOCs have been shown to have a significant diagnostic power for various diseases including asthma, acute respiratory distress syndrome and COVID-19. Automatic analysis of chromatograms can lead to improvements in the diagnosis and management of such diseases.