Southwest Research Institute’s Floodlight is an artificial intelligence-based program for chemical discovery. The software performs automated quality review of two-dimensional gas chromatography mass spectrometry data at accuracies comparable to human experts in a fraction of the time. Floodlight enables high-throughput, non-targeted analyses, screening chemicals present in food, drugs, consumer products and environmental samples.

Today’s modern analytical instruments allow chemists to determine every component in a sample without using a predefined list of targeted chemicals through what is called non-targeted analysis (NTA). Traditional targeted analysis only looks for a predefined list of compounds while missing everything else. Floodlight is the first application of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to non-targeted chemical analysis data processing for complex, gas chromatography mass spectral signals. Floodlight consistently achieves the same accuracy as a human analyst and can dramatically reduce the time needed to process the data. Floodlight will enable significantly broader use of NTA in applications ranging from energy and environmental testing to food and drug safety.