Utilizing serum and urine metabolomics for diagnosing acute intra- abdominal infection in the early stage

Background: Acute intra-abdominal infection (IAI), a normal disease of general surgery, is an important reason for patients’ death. However, owing to the defects of medical laboratory science and imaging tests, we can’t identify the patients with IAI timely. So, the metabolomics is applied to explore early biomarkers for IAI. Methods: A total of 30 IAI patients and 20 healthy volunteers are analyzed by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS). First, we utilize total ion chromatography (TIC) and principal component analysis (PCA) to judge whether differential metabolites exist. Then student t test, partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) and support vector machine (SVM) are performed to identify differential metabolites. We further use fisher discriminant analysis and hierarchical clustering analysis to observe the distinguishing effect of chosen metabolites. last, we select most eligible biomarkers based on receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC). Results: Finally, we identify 6 and 2 metabolites as biomarkers for IAI in serum and urine respectively. Conclusions: There are differential metabolites between healthy people and IAI patients. We could identify IAI patients more conveniently by detecting these biomarkers regularly.