Improved detection of drugs of abuse using high-performance ion mobility spectrometry with electrospray ionization (ESI-HPIMS) for urine matrices

High-performance ion mobility spectrometry (HPIMS) with electrospray ionization (ESI) has been used to separate drugs of abuse compounds as a function of drift time (ion mobility), which is based on their size, structural shape, and mass-to-charge. HPIMS has also been used to directly detect and identify a variety of the most commonly encountered illegal drugs, as well as a mixture of opiates in a urine matrix without extra sample pretreatment. HPIMS has shown resolving power greater than 65 comparable to that of high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with only 1 mL of solvent and sample required using air as the IMS separation medium. The HPIMS method can achieve two-order of magnitude linear response, precise drift times, and high peak area precision with percent relative standard deviations (%RSD) less than 3% for sample quantitation. The reduced mobilities measured agree very well with other IMS measurements, allowing a simple “dilute-and-shoot” method to be used to detect a mixture of codeine and morphine in urine matrix.