SPUTNIK: An R package for filtering of spatially related peaks in mass spectrometry imaging data

Abstract

SPUTNIK is an R package consisting of a series of tools to filter mass spectrometry imaging peaks characterized by a noisy or unlikely spatial distribution. SPUTNIK can produce mass spectrometry imaging datasets characterized by a smaller but more informative set of peaks, reduce the complexity of subsequent multi-variate analysis and increase the interpretability of the statistical results. Availability and implementation SPUTNIK is freely available online from CRAN repository and at https://github.com/paoloinglese/SPUTNIK. The package is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3 and is accompanied by example files and data.