7.1.5 Analysis of Exhaled Breath During Surgery
- Event
- 14th International Meeting on Chemical Sensors - IMCS 2012
2012-05-20 - 2012-05-23
Nürnberg/Nuremberg, Germany - Chapter
- 7.1 Chemical Sensors for Medical Application
- Author(s)
- J. Langejuergen, T. Hopmeier, S. Meinen, S. Zimmermann - Institute of Electrical Engineering and Measurement Technology, Leibniz University Hannover, E. Carstens, G. Theilmeier, W. Koppert - Deptartment of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care, Hannover Medical School (Germany)
- Pages
- 588 - 591
- DOI
- 10.5162/IMCS2012/7.1.5
- ISBN
- 978-3-9813484-2-2
- Price
- free
Abstract
The analysis of human breath is a non-invasive method to examine the physiological state of a patient by monitoring the exhaled metabolites. Here, we present a method to quantify ultra-low concentrations (ppt) of endogenous volatile organic compounds (VOCs) present in human breath after a short defined event like the administration of medication. The required high sensitivity is achieved by using atmospheric pressure ionization (API) in combination with a time-of-flight mass spectrometer (ToF-MS) providing sufficient mass resolution to identify relevant endogenous VOCs in breath. At present, exhaled breath is sampled in the operating room for a few seconds on thermal desorption tubes and analyzed afterwards with our API-ToF-MS laboratory prototype. Long-term focus of the project is to miniaturize the system for bed-side online breath analysis. Furthermore, high resolving power allows identifying relevant biomarkers in the first place before developing miniaturized bed-side systems or even low-cost chemical sensors.