Feasibility of serodiagnosis of ovarian cancer by mass spectrometry.

The emergence of new biological disease markers from mass spectrometric studies of serum proteomes has been quite limited. There are challenges regarding the analytical and statistical procedures, preanalytical variability, and study designs. In this serological study of ovarian cancer, we apply classification methods in a strictly designed study with standardized sample collection procedures. A total of 265 sera from women admitted with symptoms of a pelvic mass were used for model building. We developed a rigorous approach for building classification models suitable for the highly multivariate data and illustrate how to evaluate and ensure data quality and optimize data preprocessing and data reduction. We document time dependent changes in peak profiles up to 15 months after sampling even when storing samples at -20 degrees C. The developed classification model was validated using completely independent samples, and a cross validation procedure which we call cross model validation was applied to get realistic performance values. The best models were able to classify with 79% specificity and 56% sensitivity, i.e., an analytical accuracy of 68%. However, the existing serum marker (CA-125) alone gave a better analytical accuracy (81%) in the same sample set. Also, the combination of mass spectrometric data and levels of CA-125 data did not improve the predictive performance of models. In conclusion, proteomic approaches to biomarker discovery are not necessarily yielding straightforward diagnostic leads but lay the foundation for more work.