Rapid mass spectrometric metabolic profiling of blood sera detects ovarian cancer with high accuracy

Ovarian cancer diagnosis is problematic because the disease is typically asymptomatic, especially at the early stages of progression and/or recurrence. We report here the integration of a new mass spectrometric technology with a novel support vector machine computational method for use in cancer diagnostics, and describe the application of the method to ovarian cancer.

We coupled a high-throughput ambient ionization technique for mass spectrometry (direct analysis in real-time mass spectrometry) to profile relative metabolite levels in sera from 44 women diagnosed with serous papillary ovarian cancer (stages I-IV) and 50 healthy women or women with benign conditions. The profiles were input to a customized functional support vector machine-based machine-learning algorithm for diagnostic classification. Performance was evaluated through a 64-30 split validation test and with a stringent series of leave-one-out cross-validations.

The assay distinguished between the cancer and control groups with an unprecedented 99% to 100% accuracy (100% sensitivity and 100% specificity by the 64-30 split validation test; 100% sensitivity and 98% specificity by leave-one-out cross-validations).

The method has significant clinical potential as a cancer diagnostic tool. Because of the extremely low prevalence of ovarian cancer in the general population (approximately 0.04%), extensive prospective testing will be required to evaluate the test's potential utility in general screening applications. However, more immediate applications might be as a diagnostic tool in higher-risk groups or to monitor cancer recurrence after therapeutic treatment.

The ability to accurately and inexpensively diagnose ovarian cancer will have a significant positive effect on ovarian cancer treatment and outcome.