ArticleJournal of breath research2018
Exhaled human breath analysis in active pulmonary tuberculosis diagnostics by comprehensive gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and chemometric techniques.
Article in Journal of breath research, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 34 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 89 citations in OpenAlex.
- Diagnostic Performance of Artificial Intelligence-Based Methods for Tuberculosis Detection: Systematic Review.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Pooled it
- A Systematic Review of the Accuracy of Machine Learning Models for Diagnosing Pulmonary Tuberculosis: Implications for Nursing Practice and Implementation.Nursing & health sciences · 2025Pooled it
- Diagnosis of tuberculosis through breath test: A systematic review.EBioMedicine · 2019Pooled it
- Evaluating the VOCORDER device for early disease detection through breath analysis: study protocol for a two-phase clinical study.BMJ open · 2026Article
- Investigation of sputum volatiles to classify active tuberculosis: A pilot study.Tuberculosis (Edinburgh, Scotland) · 2026Article
- Advanced Technologies for the Diagnosis of Pulmonary Tuberculosis Using Exhaled Breath Samples: A Systematic Scoping Review.Tropical medicine & international health : TM & IH · 2026Article
- Profiling of Volatile Metabolites ofInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- New volatile organic compounds from the exhaled breath of active tuberculosis patients.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Exhaled breath analysis: A promising triage test for tuberculosis in young children.Tuberculosis (Edinburgh, Scotland) · 2024Article
- Analysis ofMetabolites · 2024Article
- Non-sputum-based samples and biomarkers for detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis: the hope to improve childhood and HIV-associated tuberculosis diagnosis.European journal of medical research · 2024Review
- Progress and challenges of developing volatile metabolites from exhaled breath as a biomarker platform.Metabolomics : Official journal of the Metabolomic Society · 2024Review
- Modern approaches for detection of volatile organic compounds in metabolic studies focusing on pathogenic bacteria: Current state of the art.Journal of pharmaceutical analysis · 2024Review
- Volatilomes of human infection.Analytical and bioanalytical chemistry · 2024Review
- Volatile Organic Compound Identification-Based Tuberculosis Screening among TB Suspects: A Diagnostic Accuracy Study.Advances in respiratory medicine · 2023Article
- A cross-sectional study: a breathomics based pulmonary tuberculosis detection method.BMC infectious diseases · 2023Article
- Biomarker discovery for tuberculosis using metabolomics.Frontiers in molecular biosciences · 2023Review
- Culture independent markers of nontuberculous mycobacterial (NTM) lung infection and disease in the cystic fibrosis airway.Tuberculosis (Edinburgh, Scotland) · 2023Article
- GC/MS analysis of hypoxic volatile metabolic markers in the MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cell line.Frontiers in molecular biosciences · 2023Article
- A low cost, easy-to-assemble, open-source modular mobile sampler design for thermal desorption analysis of breath and environmental VOCs.Journal of breath research · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
10 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Tuberculosis (TB) is the deadliest infectious disease, and yet accurate diagnostics for the disease are unavailable for many subpopulations. In this study, we investigate the possibility of using human breath for the diagnosis of active TB among TB suspect patients, considering also several risk factors for TB for smokers and those with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The analysis of exhaled breath, as an alternative to sputum-dependent tests, has the potential to provide a simple, fast, non-invasive, and readily available diagnostic service that could positively change TB detection. A total of 50 individuals from a clinic in South Africa were included in this pilot study. Human breath has been investigated in the setting of active TB using the thermal desorption-comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography-time of flight mass spectrometry methodology and chemometric techniques. From the entire spectrum of volatile metabolites in breath, three machine learning algorithms (support vector machines, partial least squares discriminant analysis, and random forest) to select discriminatory volatile molecules that could potentially be useful for active TB diagnosis were employed. Random forest showed the best overall performance, with sensitivities of 0.82 and 1.00 and specificities of 0.92 and 0.60 in the training and test data respectively. Unsupervised analysis of the compounds implicated by these algorithms suggests that they provide important information to cluster active TB from other patients. These results suggest that developing a non-invasive diagnostic for active TB using patient breath is a potentially rich avenue of research, including among patients with HIV comorbidities.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.