multiMarker: software for modelling and prediction of continuous food intake using multiple biomarkers measurements

Abstract

Background Metabolomic biomarkers offer potential for objective and reliable food intake assessment, and there is growing interest in using biomarkers in place of or with traditional self-reported approaches. Ongoing research suggests that multiple biomarkers are associated with single foods, offering great sensitivity and specificity. However, currently there is a dearth of methods to model the relationship between multiple biomarkers and single food intake measurements. Results Here, we introduce multiMarker, a web-based application based on the homonymous R package, that enables one to infer the relationship between food intake and two or more metabolomic biomarkers. Furthermore, multiMarker allows prediction of food intake from biomarker data alone. multiMarker differs from previous approaches by providing distributions of predicted intakes, directly accounting for uncertainty in food intake quantification. Usage of both the R package and the web application is demonstrated using real data concerning three biomarkers for orange intake. Further, example data is pre-loaded in the web application to enable users to examine multiMarker’s functionality. Conclusion The proposed software advance the field of Food Intake Biomarkers providing researchers with a novel tool to perform continuous food intake quantification, and to assess its associated uncertainty, from multiple biomarkers. To facilitate widespread use of the framework, multiMarker has been implemented as an R package and a Shiny web application.

Meeting report: plant-rich dietary patterns and health

“…Ultimately it would be valuable to be able to use these panels of biomarkers to describe what people are eating -this requires complex statistics so the Brennan group have developed a new framework that would allow the modelling of multiple markers against continuous dietary intake data; this is called the multiMarker software (19) . It gives intake prediction and also confidence intervals around that estimate; an app and R-package are also freely available (19) . Professor Brennan predicted that we will see more of these panels of biomarkers being developed and used for different foods.…”

Serum and Urine Metabolites in Healthy Men after Consumption of Acidified Milk and Yogurt

“…Recently, the web application multiMarker was launched to model and predict food intake using multimarker biomarkers. The software is an advance in the field of biomarkers of dietary intake by providing a novel tool to continuously quantify food intake and assess the associated uncertainty using multiple biomarkers [90].…”