A Novel Approach for Prostate Cancer Diagnosis using a Gas Sensor Array

Abstract

Abstract It is widely accepted that alterations inside human body are reflected in metabolism products and thus in their volatile part. Volatile compounds of human biological fluid such as urine, sweat, skin transpiration and obviously breath, could be a non-invasive access point to the individual health-state evaluation. Canine olfaction has already shown this ability with skin, and urine. Artificial olfaction is nowadays largely applied in a research context for breath analysis, and its utilization in urine headspace analysis could be of great interest. Indeed some results have been presented on the use of gas sensors array for urine samples volatile characterization for bladder cancer diagnosis[4]. Prostate cancer diagnosis is a challenging application for such technology to, due to non invasivity advantage in hospital routinely exams: haematological PSA (total Prostate-Specific Antigen) measurement, urine PC3 (Prostate Cancer gene 3) evaluation, digital rectal exploration (DRE) and biopsy.