GC Image GCxGC Edition Users' Guide

New Features and Improvements in Version 2.8

GC Image GCxGC Edition 2.8 has many new features and improvements. See the GC Image GCxGC Edition Users' Guide for full documentation.

What's New in Version 2.8 Release 3 (February 2019)


New Improvements for Ion Peak Detection

Version 2.8R3 has the following new improvements for Processing > Extract Ion Peaks as Area Objects:

Ion Peak Dialog

New Improvements for Peak Review

Version 2.8R3 has new improvements for Review mode including:

New Improvements for Library Search

Version 2.8R3 now includes replib from NIST Library in addition to mainlib by default, in order to improve the accuracy of the search results for common compounds.

In addition, Blob Table now has columns for accessing the top three hit list entries returned by Library Search including:

Additional hit list entries can be added to Blob Table as CLIC columns, for example, "Hit_Name[5]" or "Hit_Match_Factor[5]".

Ion Peak Dialog

New Improvements for Investigator

Version 2.8R3 has new features for Investigator, including:

Other New Improvements

Version 2.8R3 has other new and improved operations, including:

What's New in Version 2.8 Release 2 (November 2018)


New Support of Pulse Calibration with Centroid Data

Version 2.8R2 now supports pulse calibration for either centroid or profile data.

New and Improved Support of Custom Attributes for Peak and Sample

Custom attributes can now be specified in the Description field of a blob or an area using the JSON formatted name-value pairs. A new CUSTOMATTRIBUTE("Attribute Name") CLIC function can be used to retrieve custom attribute values to be used in Blob Table for calculation and reporting.

Template - Import Compound List is enhanced to import both built-in and custom attributes from external sources including:

Custom Attributes

Also, custom attributes for a sample can be added to a Sequence Table in a project, and automatically imported into Image Attributes during auto processing. A new MISCIMAGEATTRIBUTE("Attribute Name") CLIC function can be used to retrieve custom attribute values from the Image Attributes - Miscellaneous table to be used in Blob Table for calculation and reporting.

Improved Matching and Alignment Support

Version 2.8R2 has new improvements for template matching and raw data alignment including:

Template - Show Selected Only

Improved Support of Project Workspace

GC Image program now has a new workspace mode if invoked from GC Project program. When Project launches an Image window instance with an open project, it will set the Image window instance to use default paths of the project for import, open, configuration, template, and report functions so that a user can maintain all files related to a project together and switch from one project to another easily.

Other New Improvements

Version 2.8R2 has other new and improved operations, including:

What's New in Version 2.8 Release 1 (July 2018)


New and Improved I/O Support

GC Image GCxGC Edition 2.8r1 has new and improved I/O facilities, including:

New and Improved Ion Peak Detection

The new Processing > Extract Ion Peaks as Area Objects replaces the Extract Ion Peaks to Areas plugin included in the previous versions. The new function includes several major improvements:

Ion Peaks as Area Objects.

New Side-by-Side Image Comparison Tool

The new Compare Images - Side-by-Side tool adapts the reliable peak region alignment methods from Investigator, enables comprehensive peak matching between two chromatograms, and automates difference detection. The tool provides a set of visualizations that allow users to interactively review two chromatograms, the alignment transformation, and peak matches. It provides not only comparative visualization, but also comprehensive characterization of sample differences down to individual peaks.

Compare Images

New Investigator Tool for Finding Common and Unique Compounds

The new Compound Finder tool in Investigator allows analysts to detect common and unique compounds across many samples with specialized detection and identification constraints that use chromatographic and mass spectral information to distinguish marker compounds. In addition, the results are visualized with a labeled bubble plot, which provides not only metric values, but also instructive predictions as to which features are effective for distinguishing samples.

Compound Finder

New Investigator ML™ Plugin

The new Investigator ML is a plugin tool for supervised pattern recognition and classification. An experimental version of Investigator ML is included with GC Image GCxGC Edition Version 2.8. Investigator ML can be launched from the Investigator menu as Tools > Investigator ML. Then, from the dialog, shown below, the user selects the:

In the current version, Investigator ML supports only supervised binary classification, so only two classes can be selected and only chromatograms from those classes are available for selection as sources of the feature data. Investigator ML has a separate Users' Manual that describes its operations and use. This is available via the Help menu in the Investigator ML interface.

InvestigatorML