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Updated: Mar 10, 2026

Identification and Quantification of Deranged Metabolites in Critically Ill Patients Using NMR-Based Metabolomics
Published on: November 29, 2024
Predictive diagnosis of major depression using NMR-based metabolomics and least-squares support vector machine
Hong Zheng1, Peng Zheng2, Liangcai Zhao1
1School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou 325035, China.
Background:
Major depressive (MD) disorder is a serious psychiatric disorder that can result in suicidal behavior if not treated. The MD diagnosis using a standardized instrument instead of a structured interview will be advantageous for treatment and management of the MD, but so far no such technique exists. We developed an integrated analytical method of NMR-based metabolomics and least squares-support vector machine (LS-SVM) for predictive diagnosis of the MD.
Methods:
The metabolite profiles in clinical plasma samples obtained from 72 depressive patients and 54 healthy subjects were analyzed by NMR spectroscopy. Then, LS-SVM models with different kernels were trained and tested using 80% and 20% of samples, respectively.
Results:
We found that the best performance for the MD prediction was achieved by LS-SVM equipped with RBF kernel. Moreover, the predictive performance of the MD using multi-biomarkers was largely improved as compared with that using a single biomarker. In this study, the LS-SVM-RBF using glucose-lipid signaling can achieve the MD prediction with the AUC values of 0.94 (0.89-0.99) in the training set and 0.96 (0.92-1.00) in the test set.
Conclusion:
The LS-SVM-RBF using glucose-lipid signaling obtained from NMR spectroscopy can be used as an auxiliary diagnostic tool for the MD.

