A novel technology to integrate imaging and clinical markers for non-invasive diagnosis of lung cancer

Sci Rep. 2021 Feb 25;11(1):4597. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-83907-5.

Abstract

This study presents a non-invasive, automated, clinical diagnostic system for early diagnosis of lung cancer that integrates imaging data from a single computed tomography scan and breath bio-markers obtained from a single exhaled breath to quickly and accurately classify lung nodules. CT imaging and breath volatile organic compounds data were collected from 47 patients. Spherical Harmonics-based shape features to quantify the shape complexity of the pulmonary nodules, 7th-Order Markov Gibbs Random Field based appearance model to describe the spatial non-homogeneities in the pulmonary nodule, and volumetric features (size) of pulmonary nodules were calculated from CT images. 27 VOCs in exhaled breath were captured by a micro-reactor approach and quantied using mass spectrometry. CT and breath markers were input into a deep-learning autoencoder classifier with a leave-one-subject-out cross validation for nodule classification. To mitigate the limitation of a small sample size and validate the methodology for individual markers, retrospective CT scans from 467 patients with 727 pulmonary nodules, and breath samples from 504 patients were analyzed. The CAD system achieved 97.8% accuracy, 97.3% sensitivity, 100% specificity, and 99.1% area under curve in classifying pulmonary nodules.

MeSH terms

  • Aged
  • Aged, 80 and over
  • Biomarkers, Tumor / analysis
  • Breath Tests / methods
  • Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted
  • Early Detection of Cancer / methods
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Lung Neoplasms / diagnosis*
  • Lung Neoplasms / diagnostic imaging
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Retrospective Studies
  • Sensitivity and Specificity
  • Tomography, X-Ray Computed
  • Volatile Organic Compounds / analysis

Substances

  • Biomarkers, Tumor
  • Volatile Organic Compounds