Evidence map›Paper›PMID 42167356›Full record

ArticleRespirology (Carlton, Vic.)2026

Few-Shot Lung Cancer Classification via Electronic Nose Using Large Language Models: A Multicentre Prospective Study.

Meng-Rui Lee, Chien-Chi Huang, Joyce Yue Sun, Chang-Ru Lin, Wen-Yuan Lin, Nai-Hui Chi, Kea-Tiong Tang, Jann-Yuan Wang, Chao-Chi Ho, Jin-Yuan Shih and 1 more

Abstract readMulticenter Study
In one paragraph

Article in Respirology (Carlton, Vic.), 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
2citing papers in PubMed
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1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

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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.

2 · The registry

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3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

2 citing papers in PubMed.

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4 · The record

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5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

11 authors.

Meng-Rui LeeDepartment of Internal Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7220-4833
Chien-Chi HuangDepartment of Electrical Engineering, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan.
Joyce Yue SunInternational Bilingual School at Hsinchu-Science-Park, Hsinchu, Taiwan.
Chang-Ru LinDepartment of Internal Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.
Wen-Yuan LinDepartment of Internal Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.
Nai-Hui ChiDepartment of Nursing, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.
Kea-Tiong TangDepartment of Electrical Engineering, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan.
Jann-Yuan WangDepartment of Internal Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3406-366X
Chao-Chi HoDepartment of Internal Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8156-2413
Jin-Yuan ShihDepartment of Internal Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.
Chong-Jen YuDepartment of Internal Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5664-9392

Funding

Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan 113-2628-B-002-017-MY3
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

BACKGROUND AND

objectiveElectronic Nose (eNose) breathprints are promising non-invasive lung cancer diagnostic tools, but cross-site validation and adaptation remain barriers to clinical applications. It remains unknown whether a natural language processing-pretrained large language model (LLM) can enable few-shot, site-specific classification of lung cancer using eNose breathprints.

methodsWe collected eNose breathprints of lung cancer and non-lung cancer patients from two medical centres in Taiwan. A GPT-2-backbone LLM with parameter-efficient adaptation was compared with convolutional neural networks (CNN) trained from scratch or pretrained on CIFAR-100. Few-shot protocols (2-6 shots per class) and full-data training were evaluated.

resultsWe collected 432 eNose breathprints from two sites (S1 and S2). With 6 labelled samples per class (6 shots), LLM achieved an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.79 (95% CI: 0.71-0.87), sensitivity of 0.74 (0.63-0.83), and specificity of 0.77 (0.67-0.87) on S1. On S2, it achieved an AUC of 0.76 (0.69-0.82), sensitivity of 0.77 (0.69-0.84), and specificity of 0.61 (0.51-0.70). LLM outperforms scratch CNN models (S1; AUC: 0.44, p = 0.0002) (S2; AUC: 0.63, p = 0.0198) and CNN pretrained on CIFAR-100 images (S1; AUC: 0.57, p = 0.0100) and (S2; AUC: 0.61, p = 0.0248). LLM or a CNN model trained on the source site fails to improve performance after transferring to the target site for fine-tuning; for the LLM, performance even deteriorates.

conclusionOur study demonstrates the potential of pretrained LLMs for few-shot lung cancer classification in a real-world mixed clinical cohort, reducing dependence on large training datasets.

Indexed as

Electronic NoseLung NeoplasmsClassification AlgorithmsConvolutional Neural NetworksFemaleHumansLarge Language ModelsMaleMiddle AgedProspective StudiesSensitivity and SpecificityTaiwanbreathprintdiagnosiselectronic noselarge language modellung cancer

Identifiers

PMID42167356
PMCPMC13535749

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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.