equally to this study.

The Author(s) 2012. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Metabolomics as one of the most rapidly growing technologies in the ‘‘-omics’ ’ field denotes the comprehensive analysis of low molecular-weight compounds and their pathways. Cancer-specific alterations of the metabolome can be detected by high-throughput mass-spectrometric metabo-lite profiling and serve as a considerable source of new markers for the early differentiation of malignant diseases as well as their distinction from benign states. However, a comprehensive framework for the statistical evaluation of marker panels in a multi-class setting has not yet been established. We collected serum samples of 40 pancreatic carcinoma patients, 40 controls, and 23 pancreatitis patients according to standard protocols and generated amino acid profiles by routine mass-spectrometry. In an intrinsic three