Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) have been assessed in breath samples as possible indicators of diseases. The present study aimed to quantify 29 VOCs (previously reported as potential biomarkers of lung diseases) in breath samples collected from controls and individuals with lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma. Besides that, global VOC profiles were investigated. A needle trap device (NTD) was used as pre-concentration technique, associated to gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis. Univariate and multivariate approaches were applied to assess VOC distributions according to the studied diseases. Limits of quantitation ranged from 0.003 to 6.21 ppbv and calculated relative standard deviations did not exceed 10%. At least 15 of the quantified targets presented themselves as discriminating features. A random forest (RF) method was performed in order to classify enrolled conditions according to VOCs' latent patterns, considering VOCs responses in global profiles. The developed model was based on 12 discriminating features and provided overall balanced accuracy of 85.7%. Ultimately, multinomial logistic regression (MLR) analysis was conducted using the concentration of the nine most discriminative targets (2-propanol, 3-methylpentane, (E)-ocimene, limonene, m-cymene, benzonitrile, undecane, terpineol, phenol) as input and provided an average overall accuracy of 95.5% for multiclass prediction.
Keywords: COPD; NTD-GC-MS; VOCs; asthma; biomarkers; breath; lung cancer.