A cross-sectional study: a breathomics based pulmonary tuberculosis detection method

Diagnostics for pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) are usually inaccurate, expensive, or complicated. The breathomics-based method may be an attractive option for fast and noninvasive PTB detection.

Exhaled breath samples were collected from 518 PTB patients and 887 controls and tested on the real-time high-pressure photon ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometer. Machine learning algorithms were employed for breathomics analysis and PTB detection mode, whose performance was evaluated in 430 blinded clinical patients.

The breathomics-based PTB detection model achieved an accuracy of 92.6%, a sensitivity of 91.7%, a specificity of 93.0%, and an AUC of 0.975 in the blinded test set (n = 430). Age, sex, and anti-tuberculosis treatment does not significantly impact PTB detection performance. In distinguishing PTB from other pulmonary diseases (n = 182), the VOC modes also achieve good performance with an accuracy of 91.2%, a sensitivity of 91.7%, a specificity of 88.0%, and an AUC of 0.961.

The simple and noninvasive breathomics-based PTB detection method was demonstrated with high sensitivity and specificity, potentially valuable for clinical PTB screening and diagnosis.