( Researchers have developed an electroni...)Electronic Nose to Diagnose the Severity of Asthma,Health

Researchers have developed an electronic nose device which may be used to diagnose the severity of asthma in patients . The researchers at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands conceived the device.

The device, which is a newer version of a sensor that has been used in the food, wine and perfume industries, contains chemical vapour sensors that react to the presence of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, in a persons exhaled breath.

The electronic nose is also being used as an aid against terrorism, to sniff out explosives or toxic chemicals in the air.

"A persons breath contains a mixture of thousands of VOCs that may be used as markers of lung disease," says researcher Silvano Dragonieri, M.D.

The nose works by responding to a given odour by generating a pattern, or "smell print," which is analyzed and compared with stored patterns.

In the new study, the researchers compared the "smell prints" of 20 people with diagnosed asthma (half with severe asthma and half with mild disease) and 20 people without asthma to see if the electronic nose could classify them as asthmatic or non-asthmatic. The subjects breathed into a face mask attached to a bag connected to the electronic nose.

The nose was able to detect which smell prints came from people with asthma, but was less accurate in classifying how severe a persons asthma was.

"The asthmatic patients in this study already had been diagnosed with asthma. The next step is to see whether the nose can diagnose new patients with asthma. Its still a futuristic deviceone day different electronic noses may be built to detect specific diseases," Dr. Dragonieri says.

An electronic nose has been also been developed to diagnose respiratory infections such as pneumonia by comparing smell prints from the breath of a sick patient with those of patients with standardized readings. It is also being studied as a
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