Larkman Piers, Vascon Sebastiano, Šala Martin, Stoll Nicolas, Barbante Carlo, Bohleber Pascal
Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Ca'Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy.
Department of Geosciences, Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany.
Analyst. 2025 Jun 26. doi: 10.1039/d5an00325c.
Recent advances in high-repetition-rate lasers and fast aerosol transfer facilitate laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) mapping rates of up to megapixels per hour, however, practical limits in time and resources still hamper mapping the chemistry of square centimetre or larger areas of target samples at high resolutions. This is especially relevant for the analysis of deep sections of polar ice cores, motivating exploration of approaches to improve the efficiency of LA-ICP-MS data collection for large-area mapping. Assisted by computer vision, and demonstrated on glass and ice samples, we show how an informed experimental design coupled with computational post processing can contribute to large reductions in measurement times and lead to associated increases in measurement areas. Using various inpainting techniques, we demonstrate how the collection of data can be reduced by up to two thirds while still capturing spatial variability. Although motivated by ice core analysis, these approaches are generalisable to other target matrices and represent a new approach to large-area LA-ICP-MS mapping.
高重复率激光器和快速气溶胶传输技术的最新进展使得激光烧蚀电感耦合等离子体质谱法（LA-ICP-MS）的测绘速率高达每小时数百万像素，然而，时间和资源的实际限制仍然阻碍了在高分辨率下对平方厘米或更大面积的目标样品进行化学测绘。这对于极地冰芯深部的分析尤为重要，促使人们探索提高LA-ICP-MS大面积测绘数据收集效率的方法。在计算机视觉的辅助下，并在玻璃和冰样品上进行了演示，我们展示了明智的实验设计与计算后处理相结合如何能够大幅减少测量时间，并相应增加测量面积。使用各种修复技术，我们证明了如何在仍能捕捉空间变异性的同时，将数据收集量减少多达三分之二。尽管这些方法是受冰芯分析的启发，但它们可推广到其他目标基质，并代表了一种大面积LA-ICP-MS测绘的新方法。
