Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) is a technique which is gaining increasing interest in biomedical research due to its capacity to visualize molecules in tissues. First applied to the field of clinical proteomics, its potential for metabolite imaging in biomedical studies is now being recognized. Here we describe how to set up experiments for mass spectrometry imaging of metabolites in clinical tissues and how to tackle most of the obstacles in the subsequent analysis of the data.
Keywords: Biomarker discovery; Data analysis; Mass spectrometry imaging; Tissue metabolomics.