Importance: A triage test is needed to increase the detection rate for esophageal cancer.
Objective: To investigate whether breathomics can detect esophageal cancer among patients without a previous diagnosis of cancer using high-pressure photon ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (HPPI-TOFMS).
Design, setting, and participants: This diagnostic study included participants who planned to receive an upper endoscopy or surgery of the esophagus at a single center in China. Exhaled breath was collected with a self-designed collector and air bags before participants underwent these procedures. Sample collection and analyses were performed by trained researchers following a standardized protocol. Participants were randomly divided into a discovery data set and a validation data set. Data were collected from December 2020 to March 2021.
Exposures: Breath samples were analyzed by HPPI-TOFMS, and the support vector machine algorithm was used to construct a detection model.
Main outcomes and measures: The accuracy of breathomics was measured by the sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve.
Results: Exhaled breath samples were obtained from 675 patients (216 [32%] with esophageal cancer; 459 [68%] with noncancer diseases). Of all patients, 206 (31%) were women, and the mean (SD) age was 64.0 (11.9) years. In the validation data set, esophageal cancer was detected with an accuracy of 93.33%, sensitivity of 97.83%, specificity of 83.72%, positive predictive value of 94.74%, negative predictive value of 92.78%, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.89. Notably, for 16 patients with high-grade intraepithelial neoplasia, 12 (75%) were predicted to have esophageal cancer.
Conclusions and relevance: In this diagnostic study, testing breathomics using HPPI-TOFMS was feasible for esophageal cancer detection and totally noninvasive, which could help to improve the diagnosis of esophageal cancer.