The use of Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS) for the diagnosis of Community-Acquired Pneumonia

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Early diagnosis is important for the appropriate use of antimicrobials. In this study, we sought to determine whether plasma metabolite profile can distinguish patients with CAP and those without CAP. METHODS: We acquired and compared the plasma metabolite profile of 143 patients suffering from CAP and 97 controls without CAP using Ultra-High-Performance Liquid chromatography coupled with Quadrupole-Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry (UHPLC-QTOFMS) and statistical methods using multivariate analysis, including Volcano Plot, principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least-squares discriminate analysis (PLS-DA). RESULTS: Unsupervised method using PCA showed clear clustering of CAP cases and controls in the plasma profile (Figure 1). Supervised method using PLS-DA showed 98% accuracy in confusion matrix to differentiate CAP cases and controls in the plasma profile (Figure 2). CONCLUSION: Plasma metabolite profile can distinguish patients with CAP from those without CAP.© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Infectious Diseases Society of America