Review on exhaled volatile organic compounds from lung cancer and advances of E-nose as non-invasive detection method

Abstract

Lung cancer (LC) is known as the most common cancers and becoming the leading cause of cancer related death in human. The high mortality in lung cancer patient occurs because of lack of efficient methods to diagnose the disease at an early stage. In this review, we highlighted the studies conducted on compounds in exhaled air breath and metabolic pathway alteration in lung cancer patient, which may influence the alterations of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in exhaled air breath. This review has shown that VOCs from exhaled air breath of lung cancer patient has potential to be used as lung cancer biomarker to diagnose lung cancer at primary stage by developing advanced technology of electronic nose system.