Thesis abstract:

«p»This project aims to design an Electronic Nose (E-nose) by adding metal oxide nanoparticles functionalized with receptors for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) for early-stage cancer detection and recognition of these specific volatile biomarkers to distinguish certain cancer-associated volatile profiles from patient breath samples. The E-nose will target detection of the VOCs associated with colorectal, lung, breast, prostate, head and neck cancer, and potentially others. Key objectives are improving sensitivity and selectivity via tailored nanoparticles and advanced computational intelligence algorithms for pattern recognition. After optimizing the nanoparticles and prototype E-nose arrays, initial performance evaluation will be done under controlled lab conditions and the final performance will be evaluated using patient samples to demonstrate cancer vs healthy differentiation ability. It is hypothesized that after optimizing the functionalized nanoparticle sensors to bind the target VOCs, assembling a modular E-nose prototype, and training with the algorithm, the system will demonstrate over 90% accuracy in differentiating cancer patients from healthy controls.«/p»