Figure 1

Schematic image of IMS data collection and analysis. The data collection has four steps: MALDI-IMS of the sagittal section of a rat brain, peak picking from the mass spectrum, screening of the distributions of biomolecules and the construction of an IMS dataset. Data analysis was undertaken by performing PCA to extract the principal distribution from the IMS dataset. Hierarchical clustering was used to classify molecules by their patterns of distribution.