Chemometric evaluations of repeatability and detection limit in high-performance liquid chromatography with electrochemical detection.

The function of mutual information (FUMI) theory proposes that it is possible to obtain a relative standard deviation (RSD) of the peak area of an analyte from baseline noises and a signal on a single chromatogram when the analyte concentrations are proportional to their peak areas. In this study, we demonstrate that the FUMI theory using noise parametrization by the difference method is applicable for the evaluations of repeatability and detection limit (DL) in high-performance liquid chromatography with electrochemical detection (HPLC-ECD). HPLC-ECD for determining vincristine (VCR) was taken as an example, and VCR was detected on a glassy carbon surface at +0.8 V vs. Ag/AgCl. In the comparisons of precision profiles (plots of RSD of peak area against concentrations of an analyte), the stochastically estimated RSD (N = 1) by the FUMI theory fell within the 95% confidence intervals of statistically estimated RSD (N = 6) by repetitive measurements. Furthermore, the DL obtained by the FUMI theory (3.3×SD) was almost the same value as that by the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) = 3. Moreover, we introduced a manual method for signal-noise resolution to obtain noise parameters from a chromatogram with low-pass Bessel filter processing. In conclusion, our results show that the FUMI theory using noise parametrization by the difference method can be applied to the evaluations of repeatability and DL in HPLC-ECD without and with a low-pass Bessel filter.