Machine learning distilled metabolite biomarkers for early stage renal injury

With chronic kidney disease (CKD), kidney becomes damaged overtime and fails to clean blood. Around 15% of US adults have CKD and nine in ten adults with CKD do not know they have it. Early prediction and accurate monitoring of CKD may improve care and decrease the frequent progression to end-stage renal disease. There is an urgent demand to discover specific biomarkers that allow for monitoring of early-stage CKD, and response to treatment. To discover such biomarkers, shotgun high throughput was applied to the detection of serum metabolites biomarker discovery for early stages of CKD from 703 participants. Ultra performance liquid chromatography coupled with high-definition mass spectrometry (UPLC-HDMS)-based metabolomics was used for the determination of 703 fasting serum samples from five stages of CKD patients and age-matched healthy controls. We discovered a set of metabolite biomarkers using a series of classic and neural network based machine learning techniques. This set of metabolites can separate early CKD stage patents from normal subjects with high accuracy. Our study illustrates the power of machine learning methods in metabolite biomarker study.