Vacuum Ultraviolet Absorption Spectroscopy Analysis of Breath Acetone Using a Hollow Optical Fiber Gas Cell

Human breath is a biomarker of body fat metabolism and can be used to diagnose various diseases, such as diabetes. As such, in this paper, a vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) spectroscopy system is proposed to measure the acetone in exhaled human breath. A strong absorption acetone peak at 195 nm is detected using a simple system consisting of a deuterium lamp source, a hollow-core fiber gas cell, and a fiber-coupled compact spectrometer corresponding to the VUV region. The hollow-core fiber functions both as a long-path and an extremely small-volume gas cell; it enables us to sensitively measure the trace components of exhaled breath. For breath analysis, we apply multiple regression analysis using the absorption spectra of oxygen, water, and acetone standard gas as explanatory variables to quantitate the concentration of acetone in breath. Based on human breath, we apply the standard addition method to obtain the measurement accuracy. The results suggest that the standard deviation is 0.074 ppm for healthy human breath with an acetone concentration of around 0.8 ppm and a precision of 0.026 ppm. We also monitor body fat burn based on breath acetone and confirm that breath acetone increases after exercise because it is a volatile byproduct of lipolysis.