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. 2021 Mar 2;118:154739. doi: 10.1016/j.metabol.2021.154739

Fig. 1.

Fig. 1

Study design and flow diagram. A total of 79 COVID-19 patients, 30 COVID-19-like patients and 78 HCs were included and randomly divided into the discovery or validation cohort with age- and gender-matched patients. Each cohort consisted of 30 COVID-19 patients, 30 HCs and 15 COVID-19-like patients. All serum samples were collected from patients upon admission in each cohort to test the serum metabolites for potential biomarkers. Two random cohorts containing 216 samples from COVID-19 patients and non-COVID-19 patients were created to confirm the reliability and the universal applicability of the prediction results. Random cohort 1 included the second samples from the 51 available COVID-19 patients after 3–7 days of treatment together with the first samples from 18 COVID-19 patients at admission. Random cohort 2 included the third samples of 39 available COVID-19 patients after 7–14 days of treatment. Each random cohort was matched with the same number of COVID-19-like patients and HCs who were randomly selected from all non-COVID-19 participants.