Extraordinary virtual multidisciplinary team meetings - a novel forum for the coordinated care of patients with -complex conditions within a secondary care setting.

Multidisciplinary team (MDT) meetings are increasingly regarded as best practice for the successful management of chronic disease. However, for patients with undiagnosed illnesses, multiple interacting comorbidities or other complex needs that fall outside the remit of disease-specific MDTs or the scope of expertise of individual clinicians, there is often no suitable forum at which to discuss their care to develop a coordinated plan for management. We developed and piloted a new forum for interspecialty discussion and collaboration, an extraordinary virtual MDT, to enable clinicians to arrange an urgent meeting of all involved parties in response to challenging clinical scenarios.

Potential role of fecal volatile organic compounds as biomarkers of chemically induced intestinal inflammation in mice.

Metabolomics studies have the potential to discover biomarkers. Fecal volatile organic compounds (VOCs) have been found to differ in patients with inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel syndrome. Murine models of colitis offer an alternative to human studies in which diet can be controlled.

Freeze-drying: an alternative method for the analysis of volatile organic compounds in the headspace of urine samples using solid phase micro-extraction coupled to gas chromatography - mass spectrometry.

Background: Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) can be intermediates of metabolic pathways and their levels in biological samples may provide a better understanding about diseases in addition to potential methods for diagnosis. Headspace analysis of VOCs in urine samples using solid phase micro extraction (SPME) coupled to gas chromatography - mass spectrometry (GC-MS) is one of the most used techniques. However, it generally produces a limited profile of VOCs if applied to fresh urine.

Investigation of Volatile Organic Compounds Emitted from Faeces for the Diagnosis of Giardiasis.

Background: Giardiasis is a common intestinal infection caused by the flagellated intestinal protozoan Giardia duodenalis. Several methods are available for the laboratory diagnosis of Giardia, ranging from the microscopic identification of the parasite trophozoite and cyst stages, to immunodiagnosis and PCR. Giardia has unique metabolic pathways resulting from its lack of mitochondria, making it an ideal target for volatile organic compound (VOC) profiling.

Identifying and quantifying metabolites by scoring peaks of GC-MS data.

Background: Metabolomics is one of most recent omics technologies. It has been applied on fields such as food science, nutrition, drug discovery and systems biology. For this, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) has been largely applied and many computational tools have been developed to support the analysis of metabolomics data.

Fecal volatile organic compounds: a novel, cheaper method of diagnosing inflammatory bowel disease?

The investigation of a novel, cheaper method of diagnosing inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is an area of active research. Recently, investigations into the metabolomic profile of IBD patients and animal models of colitis compared to healthy controls has begun to receive considerable attention and correlations between the fecal volatile organic compound (VOC) metabolome and IBD is merging. Patients and clinicians have often reported a change in odor of feces during relapse of IBD.