Reporting Guidelines for Mass Spectrometry Imaging

Mass spectrometry imaging is a highly multidisciplinary technique that typically combines spatially resolved mass spectrometry with different forms of anatomical or in-vivo imaging, and may involve protein/peptide/metabolite/lipid identification & quantitation as well as bioinformatics and statistics. It can utilize a number of different mass spectrometry technologies and is applied in an increasingly diverse array of biomedical and biological applications. The different technologies and experimental goals have led to technology and application-specific approaches. It is essential that the experiments are reported in sufficient detail so that the approaches can be reproduced and verified in other laboratories; and the results validated. In this article, as part of a large European network (COST Action BM1104), a set of reporting guidelines is presented that, at a minimum, requires elements that are known to significantly affect the results to be adequately described in any MSI report. With this document we would like to initiate a more intensive discussion of reporting guidelines in the MSI community