Blog overview

You can find a list of all Aspect Analytics blog posts below.

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MSI hardware part 1: ionization techniques

Are you confused by all the acronyms used in mass spectrometry imaging? In this series of blogs, we hope to provide you with a brief introduction and explanation of some of the different things you might want to know about the technology, starting with the hardware. In this post, we will describe the main ionization techniques and tackle some of those pesky acronyms in the process.

By Alice Ly on May 13, 2021

Read time: 6 minutes
Part of series: Introduction to mass spectrometry imaging

Clojure, I Choose You!

As a software development company, choosing the right tools for the job is of paramount importance. In this post, we will explain why we opted to use Clojure for the full web stack of our platform. When building complex software, leveraging a language that not just supports but actively promotes good engineering practices provides key benefits in terms of efficiency, readability, maintenance and robustness.

By Marc Claesen on April 26, 2021

Read time: 5 minutes

Factorization of MSI data - part 1

In this first series, we will focus on factorization methods. We will show the key concepts of some pervasive approaches and how they translate to MSI data. We will apply all methods to the same data set, to facilitate comparison. In this first post, we will discuss three linear approaches, namely Principal Component Analysis (PCA), PCA + Varimax and Independent Component Analysis (ICA).

By Nico Verbeeck on June 8, 2020

Read time: 11 minutes
Part of series: Unsupervised learning on MSI data

Introduction to mass spectrometry imaging data analysis

Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) is rapidly being adopted in drug development, biomarker discovery and clinical diagnostics. In this post, we provide a high-level introduction to MSI technology along with the specific challenges and opportunities it brings in terms of data analysis. This post focuses on introducing some nomenclature and describing the main aspects about working with MSI data from a data science perspective.

By Marc Claesen on May 31, 2020

Read time: 7 minutes
Part of series: Mass spectrometry data introduction

Introduction to mass spectrometry data analysis

Mass spectrometry (MS) is an analytical technology that measures the mass-to-charge ratio (m/z) of one or more molecules present within a sample and determines their relative abundance. Mass spectrometry is pervasive within life sciences to detect, identify and quantify compounds within a sample and elucidate the structure or chemical properties of certain molecules. The technology involves ionizing the sample and then stratifying the generated ions based on mass-to-charge ratio to generate a mass spectrum, which is done using a mass spectrometer. In this introductory post, we will briefly discuss how mass spectrometry works and point out some intricacies of MS data.

By Marc Claesen on May 30, 2020

Read time: 4 minutes
Part of series: Mass spectrometry data introduction