Volatile Organic Gaseous Compound Biomarkers for Gastrointestinal Carcinoma: A Review

Among the deadly diseases most significant disease is stomach cancer or gastrointestinal carcinoma, as it is the most difficult disease to be detected at very early stage. The lack of possible symptoms is the key reason for the difficulty of early diagnosis. Among the gastrointestinal (GI) carcinomas most important cancers are the following 5 carcinomas-esophageal, gastric, liver, pancreas and colorectal. These cancers or tumor cells release the volatile gases due to the change in metabolism and from the blood capillaries the volatiles reach to the lungs. From the nasal airways volatiles are obtained. The procedures such as gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS), selected ion flow tube mass spectrometry (SIFT-MS) etc. are described with the volatiles. The volatiles obtained for the mentioned diseases are investigated. It is concluded that phenol, methyl & ethyl phenol, pentanoic & hexanoic acid, ethyl phenol and the aldehydes, like-nonanal are the confirmed Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) for gastric and esophageal carcinoma. The bar plot with the concentration in ppb level are shared. Further research on volatile detection is under scope for early diagnosis of these life-threatening diseases. Random forest, Naïve bayes etc. algorithms are used for classifying the diseases into different classes.