EASY FIA a readably usable standalone tool for high resolution mass spectrometry metabolomics data preprocessing

Flow injection analysis coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry (FIA-HRMS) is a reliable trade-off between resolution and speed for metabolomics analysis. However, free software available for data pre-processing are few, web-based, and often requiring high user specialization. Moreover, these tools rarely embedded blank and noise evaluation strategies and direct feature annotation. We developed EASY-FIA, as a free standalone application that can be employed for FIA-HRMS metabolomic data pre-processing by users with no bioinformatics/ programming skills. We validated the tool performance and applicability in two clinical metabolomics case studies. The main functions of our application are blank subtraction, alignment of the metabolites, and direct features annotation by the Human Metabolome Database (HMDB) using a minimum number of mass spectrometry parameters. In a scenario where FIA-HRMS is increasingly recognized as a reliable tool for fast metabolomics analysis, EASY-FIA can become a standardized and feasible tool easily usable by all scientists dealing with MS-based metabolomics EASY-FIA is implemented in MATLAB with the App Designer tool. It is available for download on GitHub at https://github.com/AMrbt20/ under GNU GPL v.3.0 license.