COMPUTER-AIDED RETRIEVAL OF COMMON-BATCH MEMBERS IN LEUCKART AMPHETAMINE PROFILING

Comparison of profiles is a well established way to find links between confiscated drugs. It is a laborious and time consuming task to manua lly compare large numbers of profiles to find common-batch links. To f acilitate the comparison a computerized method has been developed. It is described and applied to a set of amphetamine impurity profiles. Fr om each profile, areas of selected peaks are fed to the computer. By u sing quotients of corresponding peaks, the computer finds pairs of clo sely related profiles. With a sufficient number of peaks, the method i s tolerant to variations in intensity between profiles, random peak ar ea variations and a few strongly deviating peak areas. The program was written in Q-basic from Microsoft and may be run on any IBM-compatibl e personal computer. The method may also be used for analyzing data fr om other forensic objects, when the descriptors chosen are affected by errors like those described in the text.