US Patent 7279679 Methods and systems for peak detection and quantitation

Methods, systems and computer readable media for identifying peaks in a three-dimensional mass spectrometry/elution time dataset. The dataset is represented as a matrix of intensity values with column and row positions corresponding to specific elution time and m/z value, respectively. Peaks may be detected using a watershed image segmentation technique. Further provided are methods, systems and recordable media for creating a mask matrix to be overlaid on a large three-dimensional dataset represented as an image matrix, to identify a much smaller portion of the three dimensional dataset of interest, and to greatly reduce the amount of subsequent processing required for processing data of interest. The mask matrix has the same dimension as the image matrix and includes areas corresponding to one or more peaks identified by the watershed segmentation technique.