Use of experimental sensors for discrimination of artificial breath mixtures in a lung cancer screening context

The Pathacov project [3] aims at creating an electronic nose to detect lung cancer in the population at risk. Metal oxide sensors are being developed within the project to better detect cancer biomarkers, which are identified within a large-scale clinical study in university hospitals in the north-east of France. Before long and costly clinical trials, the performance of the prototype electronic nose has to be evaluated. In order to do this, a novel approach has been implemented. Real breath samples from healthy and available volunteers are collected in Teflon FEP sampling bags. The results of the electronic nose are processed through a principal component analysis (PCA) in order to evaluate the contribution of each sensor to the separation of the group’s clusters (healthy and cancer). This enables the selection of the best performing sensors to be included in the final prototype.