A METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR IDENTIFICATION OF BIOMARKERS IN BREATH AND METHODS OF USING SAME FOR PREDICTION OF LUNG CANCER

摘要

The present invention provides a method for identifying biomarkers and generating an output indicative of disease. The method for identifying biomarkers comprises the steps of collecting a breath sample from subjects known to have a disease and subjects known to be free of the disease; analyzing the collected breath samples to determine all mass ions in each of the collected breath samples using at least one time-resolved separation technique and at least one mass-resolved separation technique; identifying a subset of the determined mass ions in a processor as the biomarkers for detecting the disease, the subset of the determined mass ions are statistically significant for detecting the disease; and combining the subset of the determined mass ions in a multivariate algorithm in the processor to generate a value of a discriminant function indicating the likelihood that the subject has the disease.