Exhaled breath analysis for gastric cancer diagnosis in Colombian patients

// Cristhian Manuel Duran-Acevedo 1, * , Aylen Lisset Jaimes-Mogollon 1, * , Oscar Eduardo Gualdron-Guerrero 1, * , Tesfalem Geremariam Welearegay 2, * , Julian David Martinez-Marin 3, 4 , Juan Martin Caceres-Tarazona 1 , Zayda Constanza Sanchez-Acevedo 1 , Kelvin de Jesus Beleno-Saenz 5 , Umut Cindemir 6, 7 , Lars Osterlund 6, 7 and Radu Ionescu 2 1 Multisensor System and Pattern Recognition Research Group (GISM), Electronic Engineering Program, Universidad de Pamplona, Pamplona, Colombia 2 Department of Electronics, Electrical and Automatic Engineering, Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain 3 GASTROSUR S.A., Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Medicina, Bogota, Colombia 4 Hospital Universitario la Samaritana, Bogota, Colombia 5 Mechatronics Engineering Department, Universidad Autonoma del Caribe, Barranquilla, Colombia 6 Molecular Fingerprint Sweden AB, Uppsala, Sweden 7 Department of Solid State Physics, The Angstrom Laboratory, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden * These authors have contributed equally to the work Correspondence to: Cristhian Manuel Duran-Acevedo, email: cristhianmanuel@gmail.com Radu Ionescu, email: radu.ionescu@urv.cat Keywords: gastric cancer; breath analysis; volatile organic compounds; biomarkers; chemical gas sensor Received: September 18, 2017      Accepted: February 28, 2018      Published: June 22, 2018 ABSTRACT We present here the first study that directly correlates gastric cancer (GC) with specific biomarkers in the exhaled breath composition on a South American population, which registers one of the highest global incidence rates of gastric affections. Moreover, we demonstrate a novel solid state sensor that predicts correct GC diagnosis with 97% accuracy. Alveolar breath samples of 30 volunteers (patients diagnosed with gastric cancer and a controls group formed of patients diagnosed with other gastric diseases) were collected and analyzed by gas-chromatography/mass-spectrometry (GC-MS) and with an innovative chemical gas sensor based on gold nanoparticles (AuNP) functionalized with octadecylamine ligands. Our GC-MS analyses identified 6 volatile organic compounds that showed statistically significant differences between the cancer patients and the controls group. These compounds were different from those identified in previous studied performed on other populations with high incidence rates of this malady, such as China (representative for Eastern Asia region) and Latvia (representative for Baltic States), attributable to lifestyle, alimentation and genetics differences. A classification model based on principal component analysis of our sensor data responses to the breath samples yielded 97% accuracy, 100% sensitivity and 93% specificity. Our results suggest a new and non-intrusive methodology for early diagnosis of gastric cancer that may be deployed in regions lacking well-developed health care systems as a prediagnosis test for selecting the patients that should undergo deeper investigations ( e.g. , endoscopy and biopsy).