Identification of drugs in autopsy liver samples by instrumental qualitative thin-layer chromatography.

An instrumental thin-layer chromatographic (TLC) procedure is described for the identification of drugs with use of corrected RF values (hRcF) and in situ ultraviolet spectra. One hundred and eleven successive autopsy liver samples received from medical examiners were investigated by this technique and the results were compared to those obtained with a reference method. From the nineteen findings by the reference method, sixteen (84%) were correctly identified by the instrumental TLC method, using an hRcF pre-search with a window size of +/-7 units followed by a correlation search. In addition, one drug was identified correctly by correlation search only. There was no serious interference from endogenous substances, and a correlation value of about 0.9 is suggested as a limit to cut the hit list of candidates.