Ultra-Fast Label-Free Serum Metabolic Diagnosis of Coronary Heart Disease via a Deep Stabilizer.

Zhang, Mengji; Huang, Lin; Yang, Jing; Xu, Wei; Su, Haiyang; Cao, Jing; Wang, Qian; Pu, Jun; Qian, Kun

Although mass spectrometry (MS) of metabolites has the potential to provide real-time monitoring of patient status for diagnostic purposes, the diagnostic application of MS is limited due to sample treatment and data quality/reproducibility. Here, the generation of a deep stabilizer for ultra-fast, label-free MS detection and the application of this method for serum metabolic diagnosis of coronary heart disease (CHD) are reported. Nanoparticle-assisted laser desorption/ionization-MS is used to achieve direct metabolic analysis of trace unprocessed serum in seconds. Furthermore, a deep stabilizer is constructed to map native MS results to high-quality results obtained by established methods. Finally, using the newly developed protocol and diagnosis variation characteristic surface to characterize sensitivity/specificity and variation, CHD is diagnosed with advanced accuracy in a high-throughput/speed manner. This work advances design of metabolic analysis tools for disease detection as it provides a direct label-free, ultra-fast, and stabilized platform for future protocol development in clinics.