Exhaled breath analysis for lung diseases based on sensors array system

Expiratory breath contains various volatile organic compounds (VOCs) produced from inside human body. When a certain disease exists, the exhalation has specific VOCs which may be generated from disease metabolism. Many researchers have been actively workings to find different types of biomarkers which are characteristic for particular diseases. Research regarding the identification of specific diseases from exhalation is still in progress. The aim of this research is to implement early detection of lung diseases such as lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which was nominated on the 6th of domestic death rate in 2010, based on multi-sensor array system. We have been developed a system using an array of gas sensors with solid phase micro-extraction (SPME) as a sampling method to acquire sampled expiratory gases data and principle component analysis (PCA) technique was applied to analyze patterns from multi-sensor array. Throughout the experimental trails, a clearly distinguishable difference between lung disease patients and healthy controls was found from the measurement and analysis of their respective expiratory gases.