Abstract
Breath analysis is a promising new technique for nonintrusive disease diagnosis and metabolic status monitoring. One challenging issue in using a breath biomarker for potential particular disease screening is to find a quantitative relationship between the concentration of the breath biomarker and clinical diagnostic parameters of the specific disease. In order to address this issue, we need a new instrument that is capable of conducting real-time, online breath analysis with high data throughput, so that a large scale of clinical test (more subjects) can be achieved in a short period of time. In this work, we report a fully integrated, standalone, portable analyzer based on the cavity ringdown spectroscopy technique for near-real time, online breath acetone measurements. The performance of the portable analyzer in measurements of breath acetone was interrogated and validated by using the certificated gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. The results show that this new analyzer is useful for reliable online (online introduction of a breath sample without pre-treatment) breath acetone analysis with high sensitivity (57 ppb) and high data throughput (one data per second). Subsequently, the validated breath analyzer was employed for acetone measurements in 119 human subjects under various situations. The instrument design, packaging, specifications, and future improvements were also described. From an optical ringdown cavity operated by the lab-set electronics reported previously to this fully integrated standalone new instrument, we have enabled a new scientific tool suited for large scales of breath acetone analysis and created an instrument platform that can even be adopted for study of other breath biomarkers by using different lasers and ringdown mirrors covering corresponding spectral fingerprints.
Highlights
Breath analysis, offering potential for nonintrusive disease diagnosis and metabolic status monitoring via testing exhaled breath components, has become an emerging research field in medicine, human healthcare, and medical instrumentation
We report a fully integrated, standalone, portable analyzer based on the cavity ringdown spectroscopy technique for near-real time, online breath acetone measurements
The results show that this new analyzer is useful for reliable online breath acetone analysis with high sensitivity (57 ppb) and high data throughput
Summary
Breath analysis, offering potential for nonintrusive disease diagnosis and metabolic status monitoring via testing exhaled breath components, has become an emerging research field in medicine, human healthcare, and medical instrumentation. Current technology drawbacks in breath analysis instrumentation or method such as using sample pre-concentration, time-consuming sample preparation, and long data analysis time often result in the limited number of human subjects or samples used in a breath study.[1–4] research data on breath analysis are of less statistical significance for addressing a fundamental question in the field such as what is the quantitative relationship between the concentration of a breath biomarker and a clinical diagnostic parameter, because addressing this question is heavily dependent upon availability of large amounts of clinical data. We have built a fully integrated instrument based on the pulsed-CRDS technique for near-real time, online breath acetone measurements This portable instrument can be readily placed in different places such as an office in a clinic to achieve quantitative analysis of breath acetone using a large number of subjects in a short period of time. Details of the five major components that were integrated in the instrument, the light source, the optical ringdown cavity, the data acquisition, the sampling device, and the electronic control, are described below
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