Jornal de Biomarcadores Moleculares e Diagnóstico

A Metabonomic Study on Samples of Cutaneous Leishmaniasis and its Correlation with the Selenium Level in the Blood Serum

Abstract

Mohsen Tafazzoli, Fathi Fariba, Darvizeh Fatemeh, Zahra Zamani and Pourfallah Fatemeh

This paper presents the result of extensive experiments on the blood serum samples of 20 leishmaniasis patients and 44 healthy individuals using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and the Chenomx software. The concentrations of selenium in all 64 serum samples were also measured using an atomic absorption device. The healthy and patient groups were completely differentiated using the partial least square method (PLS). In addition, important variables that could highly infl uence the group of patients were detected by the PLS loading plot. This paper also presents the results corresponding to linear and non-linear modeling of selenium concentration in serum. Stepwise multiple linear regression (MLR) was used to select the fi ve most important descriptors. In the multiple linear regression modeling approach the results obtained for R2 training, test and validation sets were 0.98, 0.97 and 0.94 respectively. Employing the same descriptors in the MLR modeling approach, a non-linear artifi cial neural network (ANN) with a 5-3- 1 structure was constructed; the results obtained from this model showed no signifi cant improvement compared with those of MLR. There was good agreement between the experimental values of selenium concentration and the values from the two models.