Estimation value of plasma amino acid target analysis to the acute radiation injury early triage in the rat model

Rapid radiation injury early triage for large-scale people after radiation exposure is vital for limited medical resources allocation and early treatment of a large number of wounded after a nuclear accident. Owing to the high-throughput analysis and minimally invasive of collection sample, radiation metabolomics has been recently applied to radiation damage researches. Here, exploration the feasibility of estimating the acute radiation injury early triage by means of plasma amino acid target analysis was attempted using high performance liquid chromatography-electrospray tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-ESI-MS/MS) technique. The nonlinear kernel partial least squares (KPLS) model was used to classify the radiation damage levels. The classification accuracy of without radiation exposure was 92.3 % at 5 h after exposure. At 24 h after exposure, the triage accuracies were all above 83 % in the different doses of irradiated groups, the correct classification rates of moderate and severe radiation injury were 91.7 and 92.3 % respectively. At 72 h after exposure, the classification accuracies of all levels of radiation injury were more than 90 %, the correct classification rates of moderate and severe groups were up to 100 %. This approach is useful for early predicting different levels of radiation exposure and for developing metabolomics strategies for radiation biodosimetry in humans, but need more data to consummate.