Radu Ionescu
Uppsala University , Sweden
Title: Diagnosis of Human Echinococcosis via Exhaled Breath Analysis
Biography
Biography: Radu Ionescu
Abstract
Human echinococcosis is among the most neglected infectious diseases affecting more than one million people globally. The diagnosis and treatment of human echinococcosis is often expensive and the disease remains complicated to treat. The detection and diagnosis of echinococcus infections at an early stage is highly needed for the prescription of suitable clinical treatment. In this study, we introduce a non-invasive, fast, easy-to-operate and non-expensive diagnostic tool for the diagnosis of human echinococcosis disease through exhaled breath analysis, suitable for early diagnosis and population screening. A case control study was realized on a group of volunteers diagnosed with the two main types of the disease, cystic echinococcosis and alveolar echinococcosis, recruited in hospitals from Tunisia and Poland, as well as their control groups. The chemical analysis of the breath samples by gas chromatography coupled to mass spectroscopy revealed statistically different compounds in the breath of the patients as compared to controls. Based on these results, an electronic nose system comprising an array of highly sensitive chemoresistive gas sensors was developed and trained for the diagnosis of human echinococcosis. The classification success rate achieved by our electronic nose system was 100% for cystic echinococcosis and 92.9% for alveolar echinococcosis, while the discrimination between these patient groups was 92.1%. The test proposed in this study is simple to perform and interpret, and can be used in both specialist and non-specialist settings. Therefore it could represent a very useful diagnostic tool to combat infectious diseases caused by helminths, in particular in low-resource regions.