Perspectives on the use of chemometrics in laboratory medicine

Today's automated laboratory instruments are capable of generating prodigious volumes of high-quality measurements. Increasingly, the powerful mathematical and statistical methods of chemometrics are being called upon to help reduce these measurements to useful information. Chemometric methods have been important in automating various data-intensive functions of the clinical laboratory, including analysis of cellular images, identification of bacteria and fungi on the basis of their metabolic and chemical properties, and identification of drugs and toxic substances from their mass spectra. These methods also appear promising in aiding both the selection and interpretation of laboratory tests for diagnosis, monitoring, and prognosis. In spite of the demonstrated potential of these methods, significant problems remain to be solved in the areas of measurement standardization, data-base collection, and user familiarity with these approaches before chemometric methods can be used most fully by the clinical laboratory.