Hadamard transform ion mobility spectrometry

A detection scheme that makes use of the Hadamard transform has been employed with an atmospheric-pressure ion mobility spectrometer fitted with an electrospray ionization source. The Hadamard transform was implemented through the use of a linear-feedback shift register to produce a pseudorandom sequence of 1023 points. This pseudorandom sequence was applied to the ion gate of the spectrometer, and deconvolution of the ion signal was accomplished by the Hadamard transform to reconstruct the mobility spectrum. Ion mobility spectra were collected in both a conventional and Hadamard mode, with comparisons made between the two approaches. Initial results exhibited low spectral definition, so an oversampling technique was applied to increase the number of data points across each analyte spectral peak. The use of the Hadamard transform increases the duty cycle of the instrument to 50% and results in a roughly 5-fold enhancement of the signal-to-noise ratio with a negligible loss of instrument resolution. It is also shown that any potential multiplex disadvantage, which limits the attractiveness of some high-throughput techniques, is not a limiting factor in this new implementation.