Lipidomic study and diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma tumor with rapid evaporative ionization mass spectrometry

Abstract

Liver cancer is generally considered the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) contributes to more than 90% of liver cancers. The altered lipid metabolism for rapid cancer cell growth and tumor formation has been frequently proven. In this study, an ambient ionization mass spectrometry technique, rapid evaporative ionization mass spectrometry (REIMS) using a monopolar electric knife, called iKnife, was systematically optimized and employed for ex vivo analysis of 12 human HCC tumor tissue specimens together with the paired paracancerous tissue (PT) and noncancerous liver tissue (NCT) specimens. Nine free fatty acids and 34 phospholipids were tentatively identified according to their extract masses and/or tandem mass spectra. With the help of statistical methods, 7 free fatty acids and 10 phospholipids were distributed differently in 3 types of liver tissue specimens (95% confidence interval). The box plots showed these characterized lipid metabolites varied in PT, HCC, and NCT. Compared with PT and NCT, the upregulations of four common fatty acids FA 18:0,

Rapid evaporative ionization mass spectrometry: A survey through 15 years of applications

“…In the latter case, the intraoperative definition of tumor margins is crucial in determining patient outcomes, ensuring progression-free survival, and avoiding post-operative deficits. Within this context, most clinical REIMS applications regard the analysis of breast [1,9,42,44,51], gynecological [11,13,43,52], skin [8,10,14,51], and gastrointestinal tumors [12,40,41,47,[53][54][55][56], which are quite common and frequently subjected to surgical resection. On the other hand, the building of a large database represents a challenge for brain tumors, due to the special attention paid to the preservation of healthy tissue during surgery.…”