Exhaled breath analysis using electronic nose and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry for non-invasive diagnosis of chronic kidney disease, diabetes mellitus and healthy subjects

Abstract

Breath Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC’s) analysis is a non-invasive tool to assess information about health status. This study aims to investigate exhaled breath of Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD), Diabetes Mellitus (DM) and Healthy Subjects (HS), using electronic nose (e-nose) and Gas Chromatography Quadrupole Time-Of-Flight Mass spectrometry (GC/Q-TOF-MS). Breath samples were collected from 44 volunteers containing 14 females and 30 males. Urine samples were also collected to measure Creatinine Level (CL) by UV–vis Spectrophotometry as reference method. GC/Q-TOF-MS was used to identify volatile organic compounds that were detected in the exhaled breath of CKD, DM, and healthy subjects at different CL concentrations. The e-nose dataset was treated with Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) and Partial Least Squares-regression (PLS-regression). PLS model revealed a relationship between breath and urinary CL. The presented results show that e-nose based on chemical gas sensors in combination with pattern recognition methods could constitute the basis of inexpensive and non-invasive diagnosis to distinguish between breath of CKD, DM patients and healthy controls based on breath VOC’s analysis.