Patent ID: 7488935

Claim:
A mass spectrometry system, comprising: (a) an ion source to ionize a sample stream; (b) a detector positioned downstream with respect to the ion source to acquire mass spectrometry data of the sample stream; and (c) a data analyzer connected to the detector and comprising: (i) a chromatogram generator to process the mass spectrometry data to derive a chromatogram that includes a sequence of data points arranged based on scan number; (ii) a data point selector to reorder the sequence of data points according to magnitudes of the sequence of data points to thereby generate a reordered sequence of data points and to apply a selection criterion to the reordered sequence of data points to select data points from the chromatogram; and (iii) a peak discriminator to apply a matched filter to the data points to detect a peak in the chromatogram, wherein a width of the matched filter is defined based on an expected width of the peak, and the peak is indicative of a presence of an analyte in the sample stream.