Sensing disease with breath and commercial MOS sensors : a review

In recent years, there have been many attempts at creating electronic noses to detect diseases using off the shelf Metal Oxide Semiconductor (MOS) sensors.
This review aims at showing which sensors were used, which diseases were tried, and how well the clinical trials went. The goal is to give a view of what has been done and to help with future projects. In this review, 23 articles about disease sensing electronic noses using
commercial MOS sensors were selected (out of 445 identified records). A few sensor models (mainly Figaro and Winsen) dominate the field, mostly for Volatile Organic Compound detection. Relatively few papers propose mixed technology arrays, preferring all MOS. Classification accuracies seem good but that may be an effect of the small sample pools. Many studies (65%) lack transparency about which sensors and features are most important for disease discrimination. A systematic communication of these results could be beneficial to the field. The creation of a database of sensor uses, defects and qualities from actual usage in experimental devices could help in creating better sensors and better electronic noses.