Diagnostic Power Comparison Between VOCs and CTCs

Early diagnosis of malignant tumors is pivotal for improving their prognoses. Circulating tumor cells (CTC) in peripheral blood and Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in exhaled breath are newly developed diagnosis method. Due to the low percentage of CTCs in peripheral blood of cancer patients and the surface structure of lymphocytes (especially megakaryocytes) is often confused with tumor cells, CTC has a high false positive and negative rate. In recent years, the detection of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in exhaled breath as a simple and noninvasive method has shown broad application prospects in the diagnosis of various diseases. A series of studies of VOCs diagnosing solid tumors the investigators had conducted in the past decade show that VOCs can not only distinguish different types of tumors, but also can make a distinction between different stages. This study was to compare CTC and VOCs with clinical samples. Predictive models will be built employing discriminant factor analysis (DFA) pattern recognition method. Sensitivity and specificity will be determined using leave-one-out cross-validation or an independent blind test set.