Statistical characterization of chemical noise in MALDI TOF MS by wavelet analysis of multiple noise realizations.

Noise reduction is a critical step in proteomic profiling by mass spectrometry for identification of disease biomarkers. We propose a new method for characterizing chemical noise in MALDI TOF mass spectrometry using wavelet analysis of multiple noise realizations. The use of multiple measurements of the noise process enables a more reliable characterization than can be obtained from a single measurement. We analyzed the distributions and summary statistics of the wavelet coefficients.