Patent ID: 8723108

Claim:
A method for correcting spectral data in a time-of-flight mass spectrometer (TOF MS), the method comprising: (a) introducing a mixture of analyte ions and one or more reference mass (RM) ions into the TOF MS; (b) recording a plurality of transient spectra comprising analyte peaks corresponding to detected analyte ions and one or more RM peaks corresponding to one or more detected RM ions; (c) summing the recorded transient spectra to obtain a compound spectrum; (d) centroiding the RM peaks of the compound spectrum to obtain a set of averaged peak centroids (APC); (e) comparing positions of one or more RM peaks in each recorded transient spectrum to corresponding RM centroids in the APC; (f) based on the comparison, applying a correction function to the respective recorded transient spectra to obtain respective corrected transient spectra; and (g) summing the corrected transient spectra to obtain a corrected averaged spectrum comprising corrected peaks of the analyte ions detected.