Translational biomarker discovery in clinical metabolomics: an introductory tutorial

Metabolomics is increasingly being applied towards the identification of biomarkers for disease diagnosis, prognosis and risk prediction. Unfortunately among the many published metabolomic studies focusing on biomarker discovery, there is very little consistency and relatively little rigor in how researchers select, assess or report their candidate biomarkers. In particular, few studies report any measure of sensitivity, specificity, or provide receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curves with associated confidence intervals. Even fewer studies explicitly describe or release the biomarker model used to generate their ROC curves. This is surprising given that for biomarker studies in most other biomedical…

• GC
  Genome Canada
• GA
  Genome Alberta
• CI
  Canadian Institutes of Health Research