Exhaled gases online measurements for esophageal cancer patients and healthy people by proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry

Abstract Background Esophageal cancer is a prevalent malignancy. There is a considerable demand for developing a fast and noninvasive method to screen out the suspect esophageal cancer patients who may undergo further clinical diagnosis. Methods The exhaled breathes from 29 esophageal cancer patients and 57 healthy people were directly measured using our home‐made proton transfer reaction mass spectrometer (PTR‐MS). Mann‐Whitney U test and stepwise discriminant analysis were applied to identify the ions in the breath mass spectral data which can distinguish cancer cohort from healthy group. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analysis was also performed. Results Seven kinds of ions in the breath mass spectrum, viz., m/z 136, m/z 34, m/z 63, m/z 27, m/z 95, m/z 107 and m/z 45, have been found to distinguish between the esophageal cancer patients and healthy people with a sensitivity of 86.2% and a specificity of 89.5%, respectively. Compared with that from the healthy people, the breath mass spectra from esophageal cancer patients show that the mediant intensities of five kinds of ions were decrease and the rest two kinds of ions were increase. ROC analysis gave the area under the curve (AUC) of 0.943. Conclusions This pilot study shows that the ionic characteristics of exhaled VOCs detected by PTR‐MS may be used to differentiate between the esophageal cancer patients and the healthy people. Although the breath tests for more patients are needed to confirm such results, the present work indicates that the PTR‐MS may be a promising method in the esophageal cancer screening.