HPTLC Extractor

This small python package has been made to enable the conversion from HTPLC image to json files, with the aim of creating standardize databases.

Installation

The tool was developped in Python 3.8. It requires python to be install on your machine.

In order to use HPTLC_extractor, simply download and extract the ZIP file localy. Then, from the terminal, you can install the required python packages by moving to the location of the HTPLC_extractor folder and running the following command:

pip install -r requirements.txt

How to use it

Then, you should fill the config.py file with the information from your experiment and save the changes. This is the only file that you should need to modify. Once everything is setup you can run the tool.

On your terminal you can execute:

python -c "import hptlc; hptlc.main()"

This will result in the creation of well structured storage files. However, it requires standard HPTLC procedures and does not allow anything else.

If you want to visualize some json files you can run:

python -c "import hptlc; hptlc.show_curve()"

It will show all the HPTLC curves specified in the variable "show" from the config.py file.

Compare samples

One of the main advantage of having a standardize package to extract HPTLC curves is that we can perform data analysis. In compare.py we propose a metric to compute the similarity between any sample and the rest of the samples. In practice, we compute a distance (in a high dimensional space) between the sample of interest and all the other samples. In order to compute this distance, simply fill the compute_distances variable inside config.py and run:

python -c "import compare; compare.main()"

Such method can, for example, be used as a way to indentify an unknown sample.