Breath Analysis & Air Quality: How Breathomix Ensures Reliable Results
Air Quality Influences Breath Analysis
Air quality plays a pivotal role in breath analysis, a diagnostic approach that examines the complete mix of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in exhaled breath to detect diseases and monitor health. Environmental pollutants, dietary habits, smoking behavior, and other external factors can significantly influence the VOC profile, making accurate analysis a complex task. At Breathomix, this challenge is addressed with a powerful combination of hardware and advanced data processing through the SpiroNose and BreathBase platform.
The SpiroNose: Harnessing Precision with Sensor Technology
The SpiroNose is a advanced electronic nose (eNose) equipped with 4 sets of 7 metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) sensors. This unique configuration includes:
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Two sensor sets dedicated to monitoring ambient air continuously.
These sensors detect the VOC-profile of the environment and allow for real-time correction of the inhaled air’s composition. For example, if a patient breathes in air containing high levels of certain VOCs, the system can differentiate between these exogenous compounds and those produced within the body. -
Two additional sensor sets focused on the exhaled breath.
These sensors analyze the VOC-profile emitted by the patient to detect potential biomarkers indicative of disease.
This dual approach, combined with advanced algorithms, ensures that the SpiroNose can correct for variations in environmental air quality, offering unmatched precision in breath analysis.
BreathBase: The Backbone of Reliable Breath Analysis
While the SpiroNose is crucial for accurate VOC detection, it is the integration with the BreathBase platform that truly unlocks the potential of breath analysis. BreathBase includes a large, cloud-based reference database containing both breath profiles and associated clinical metadata, including:
- Medication use,
- Dietary intake,
- Smoking behavior,
- Co-morbidities, and more.
By leveraging this database, BreathBase can:
- Account for confounding variables. External factors such as food intake or recent smoking behavior can alter the VOC profile, potentially masking or mimicking disease signals. BreathBase enables algorithms to weigh these factors, significantly reducing the “noise” in the data.
- Enhance disease signal detection. By comparing a patient’s breath profile to a vast collection of reference profiles, BreathBase identifies patterns and deviations that correlate with specific diseases, such as lung cancer, cystic fibrosis, epilepsy or interstitial lung diseases (ILD).
Why Air Quality Correction Matters
Environmental air is a cocktail of VOCs from sources like industrial emissions, vehicle exhaust, and even household products. These exogenous compounds can easily infiltrate the respiratory system and mix with endogenous VOCs produced by the body. Without careful correction, these external influences can obscure the subtle biomarkers of disease, leading to false positives or negatives.
The combination of the SpiroNose and BreathBase addresses this issue by:
- Continuously monitoring ambient air in real time to correct for inhaled VOCs, ensuring that only disease-relevant signals are analyzed.
- Using the reference database to contextualize individual breath profiles within a broader population, allowing for personalized diagnostics that consider external influences.
Limitations and the Importance of User Compliance
Despite the advanced correction techniques of the SpiroNose and BreathBase, not all environmental factors can be fully accounted for. Some variables, such as extreme air pollution exposure shortly before testing, can still influence breath profiles in ways that are difficult to correct entirely.
To ensure accurate and reliable breath analysis, it is crucial that users adhere to predefined test conditions, which include:
- Avoiding alcohol consumption prior to testing,
- Following standardized operating procedures during breath measurement,
- Conducting the test in a controlled environment that meets the necessary conditions.
By maintaining these standardized conditions, the integrity of breath test results is preserved, allowing for consistent, reproducible, and clinically reliable diagnostics.
The Future of Breath Analysis
As Breathomix continues to expand its reference database and refine its algorithms, the accuracy and applicability of breath analysis will only improve. By addressing the influence of air quality and other external factors, Breathomix is not just advancing breath analysis—it is transforming it into a reliable, routine tool for healthcare professionals worldwide.
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