Using 3D Hahn Moments as A Computational Representation of ATS Drugs Molecular Structure

The campaign against drug abuse is fought by all countries, most notably on ATS drugs. The technical limitations of the current test kits to detect new brand of ATS drugs present a challenge to law enforcement authorities and forensic laboratories. Meanwhile, new molecular imaging devices which allowed mankind to characterize the physical 3D molecular structure have been recently introduced, and it can be used to remedy the limitations of existing drug test kits. Thus, a new type of 3D molecular structure representation technique should be developed to cater the 3D molecular structure acquired physically using these molecular imaging devices. One of the applications of image processing methods to represent a 3D image is 3D moments, and this study formulates a new 3D moments technique, namely 3D Hahn moments, to represent the 3D molecular structure of ATS drugs. The performance of the proposed technique was analysed using drug chemical structures obtained from UNODC for the ATS drugs, while non-ATS drugs are obtained randomly from ChemSpider database. The evaluation shows the technique is qualified to be further explored in the future works to be fully compatible with ATS drug identification domain.