Date of Award
2006
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science
Program
Computer Science
Supervisor
Dr. Bin Ma
Abstract
Storing mass spectrometry data is a challenge faced by every mass spectrometry core facility. A Q-TOF mass spectrometer can produce as much as one gigabyte of data in an hour. Without data compression, these data would fill the expensive disk arrays rapidly. Common data compression software such as gzip, WinZip, and WinRAR do not take full advantage of the regularities in MS data. We developed cross-platform software MSPack to compress MS data, as well as regular computer files. MSPack is more flexible, faster, and achieves better compression ratio than other tools. On Q-TOF raw data, MSPack can compress the data to one tenth of its original size. Another challenge caused by the large amount of data is data visualization. Human eyes are very good at recognizing patterns from images but not from millions of numerical values. Being able to display the overall image of LC-MS experimental data will help human to understand the data and find useful information from the LC-MS experiments. For such purpose, we also developed data visualization software to help human users visualize the large LC-MS data.
Recommended Citation
Xie, Mingjie, "MASS SPECTROMETRY DATA COMPRESSION AND VISUALIZATION" (2006). Digitized Theses. 4986.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/digitizedtheses/4986