Evaluation of a gas sensor array and pattern recognition for the identification of bladder cancer from urine headspace

摘要

Previous studies have indicated that volatile compounds specific to bladder cancer may exist in urinenheadspace, raising the possibility that headspace analysis could be used for diagnosis of this particularncancer. In this paper, we evaluate the use of a commercially available gas sensor array coupled withna specifically designed pattern recognition algorithm for this purpose. The best diagnostic performancenthat we were able to obtain with independent test data provided by healthy volunteers and bladderncancer patients was 70% overall accuracy (70% sensitivity and 70% specificity). When the data ofnpatients suffering from other non-cancerous urological diseases were added to those of the healthyncontrols, the classification accuracy fell to 65% with 60% sensitivity and 67% specificity. While this isnnot sufficient for a diagnostic test, it is significantly better than random chance, leading us to concludenthat there is useful information in the urine headspace but that a more informative analytical technique,nsuch as mass spectrometry, is required if this is to be exploited fully.