Detection of lung cancer with electronic nose using a novel ensemble learning framework

Breath analysis based on electronic nose (e-nose) is a promising new technology for the detection of lung cancer that is non-invasive, simple to operate and cost-effective. Lung cancer screening by e-nose relies on predictive models established using machine learning methods. However, using only a single machine learning method to detect lung cancer has some disadvantages, including low detection accuracy and high false negative rate. To address these problems, groups of individual learning models with excellent performance were selected from classic models, including support vector machine, decision tree, random forest, logistic regression andK-nearest neighbor regression, to build an ensemble learning framework (PCA-SVE). The output result of the PCA-SVE framework was obtained by voting. To test this approach, we analyzed 214 breath samples measured by e-nose with 11 gas sensors of four types using the proposed PCA-SVE framework. Experimental results indicated that the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of the proposed framework were 95.75%, 94.78%, and 96.96%, respectively. This framework overcomes the disadvantages of a single model, thereby providing an improved, practical alternative for exhaled breath analysis by e-nose.