The promise of metabolic phenotyping in gastroenterology and hepatology

Key Points Spectroscopically directed metabolic profiling has the potential to enhance current capabilities in patient stratification Examples of the contribution of metabolic profiling to disease diagnostics and prognostics as applied to liver and digestive diseases are widely present in the literature Metabolic profiling provides insights about the function of gut bacteria, which are known to be involved in a wide range of pathologies including IBD, obesity, fatty liver and colorectal cancer Surgical metabonomics centred on mass-spectrometry-linked intelligent surgical devices have the potential to deliver clinically relevant chemical information in real-time to augment clinical decision-making