Research Article
Gong ZY, Sun MX, Jian CY, Wang
Abstract
Acetone in exhaled breath is a potential biomarker of diabetes mellitus (DM) and elevated breath acetone concentrations have been observed in DM patients. One of the near real-time and online breath acetone analysis techniques is cavity ringdown spectroscopy (CRDS) that has been demonstrated for breath acetone measurements in human subjects including diabetic patients in a clinic. In this work, we have constructed a ringdown breath acetone analyzer for the purpose of instrument validation. Its detection capabilities, such as limit of detection, baseline stability, detection sensitivity, and reproducibility, were investigated. For the first time, a ringdown acetone breath analyzer has been validated using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), which is typically referred to as the golden standard method for trace gas analysis. The GC-MS validation challenged the analyzer’s response to various breath acetone concentrations and its quantitative measurement accuracy. Subsequently, 25 subjects including 19 healthy and 6 diabetic people were tested using the validated ringdown breath acetone analyzer. Comparison of the testing results shows that this ringdown breath acetone analyzer can be used for reliable real-time, online breath acetone analysis in a clinic.