Department of Physics and Earth Sciences, University of Ferrara, 44122 Ferrara, Italy.
SCENT S.r.l (SME company), Via Quadrifoglio 11, 44124 Ferrara, Italy.
Molecules. 2021 Jan 17;26(2):466. doi: 10.3390/molecules26020466.
User-friendly, low-cost equipment for preventive screening of severe or deadly pathologies are one of the most sought devices by the National Health Services, as they allow early disease detection and treatment, often avoiding its degeneration. In recent years more and more research groups are developing devices aimed at these goals employing gas sensors. Here, nanostructured chemoresistive metal oxide (MOX) sensors were employed in a patented prototype aimed to detect volatile organic compounds (VOCs), exhaled by blood samples collected from patients affected by colorectal cancer and from healthy subjects as a control. Four sensors, carefully selected after many years of laboratory tests on biological samples (cultured cells, human stools, human biopsies, etc.), were based here on various percentages of tin, tungsten, titanium, niobium, tantalum and vanadium oxides. Sensor voltage responses were statistically analyzed also with the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, that allowed the identification of the cut-off discriminating between healthy and tumor affected subjects for each sensor, leading to an estimate of sensitivity and specificity parameters. ROC analysis demonstrated that sensors employing tin and titanium oxides decorated with gold nanoparticles gave sensitivities up to 80% yet with a specificity of 70%.
用户友好、低成本的医疗设备，用于预防严重或致命疾病的筛查，是国民健康服务系统最需要的设备之一，因为它们可以实现早期疾病的检测和治疗，通常可以避免疾病恶化。近年来，越来越多的研究小组正在开发针对这些目标的设备，采用气体传感器。在这里，经过多年对生物样本（培养细胞、人类粪便、人类活检等）的实验室测试，精心选择了纳米结构的电阻式金属氧化物（MOX）传感器，用于检测挥发性有机化合物（VOCs），这些 VOCs 是从患有结直肠癌的患者和健康对照者的血液样本中呼出的。基于不同比例的锡、钨、钛、铌、钽和钒氧化物，这里使用了四个传感器。还使用接收器操作特性（ROC）曲线对传感器电压响应进行了统计分析，这允许为每个传感器确定区分健康和肿瘤受影响个体的截止值，从而估计敏感性和特异性参数。ROC 分析表明，用金纳米粒子修饰的锡和钛氧化物传感器的灵敏度高达 80%，但特异性为 70%。
