Abstract
Recent advancements in the use of electronic-nose (e-nose) devices to analyze human breath profiles for the presence of specific volatile metabolites, known as biomarkers or chemical bio-indicators of specific human diseases, metabolic disorders and the overall health status of individuals, are providing the potential for new noninvasive tools and techniques useful to point-of-care clinical disease diagnoses. This exciting new area of electronic disease detection and diagnosis promises to yield much faster and earlier detection of human diseases and disorders, allowing earlier, more effective treatments, resulting in more rapid patient recovery from various afflictions. E-nose devices are particularly suited for the field of disease diagnostics, because they are sensitive to a wide range of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and can effectively distinguish between different complex gaseous mixtures via analysis of electronic aroma sensor-array output profiles of volatile metabolites present in the human breath. This review provides a summary of some recent developments of electronic-nose technologies, particularly involving breath analysis, with the potential for providing many new diagnostic applications for the detection of specific human diseases associated with different organs in the body, detectable from e-nose analyses of aberrant disease-associated VOCs present in air expired from the lungs.
Highlights
Traditional methods for the detection and diagnosis of diseases are often invasive and expensive or require time-consuming biological, microscopic or complex analytical tests
The search for noninvasive methods of human disease diagnosis have led to the discovery of more rapid, electronic methods of detecting and analyzing complex gaseous mixtures containing volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including metabolites and abnormal chemicals that are specific indicators of disease, released from the body directly in air expired from the lungs and body cavities or from the headspace of body fluids and soft tissue samples collected from sick patients during clinical examinations [8]
The many types of e-nose instruments range from surface acoustic wave (SAW), quartz crystal microbalance (QMB), metal oxide semiconducting (MOS) and conducting polymers (CP), to the newer DNA-carbon nanotubes [10], and many others [9]
Summary
Traditional methods for the detection and diagnosis of diseases are often invasive and expensive or require time-consuming biological (culturing), microscopic (cell or tissue biopsy) or complex analytical (chemical) tests. Some conventional methods used in clinical diagnoses include many invasive and potentially hazardous biopsy procedures, endoscopy [1], computed tomography [2], DNA marker and homology tests, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) [3], mammography [4], microbial culture tests, positron emission tomography (PET) [5], serological and other blood tests, ultrasonography [6] and X-ray imaging of other organs [7] Many of these methods present some risks of serious negative side effects, but often are sufficiently painful to discourage patients from participating in preemptive, prophylactic disease-screening procedures. Breath-associated exogenous biomarkers are potential indicators of increased risk of future disease development in the body due to short-term or prolonged exposure to toxic or noxious fumes through inhalation
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