Breathe Analysis for Medical Diagnostics –A Review

It is essential to develop a new diagnostic and detection technology for the increasing number of clinical challenges in coming years. Though there are investigations such as EEG, ECG, bronchoscopy and needle biopsy to detect cancers, but they have associated risks and substantial costs and hence they are not suitable for early screening. This paper is an effort to review on the breath analysis, which is a new diagnostics frontier based on the detection of disease-related volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Breath Analysis, involves testing of exhaled breath samples, is a rapid, simple, portable, relatively inexpensive and non-invasive approach of analyzing malignant or benign diseases. It also aims to study the potential of various biomarkers to diagnose a disease and to evaluate various techniques in breath analysis. Finally the importance of nanomaterial based sensors is reviewed stating its advantages compared to other techniques. We conclude with a brief discussion on the diagnosis of diseases like diabetes, lung disorder and kidney disorder using nanomaterial based sensors and the expected outcomes and limitations.