Bronchiectasis is a chronic airway inflammation with irreversible expansion of bronchial walls, which is characteristic by chronic cough, mucinous sputum, dyspnea and wheezing. High resolution CT (HRCT) combined with clinical manifestations is the main diagnostic method of bronchiectasis, but HRCT is expensive and radioactive. Therefore, it is urgent to develop a new technology to diagnose bronchiectasis. Exhaled breath may be a better tool for bronchiectasis detection because of its noninvasive nature. Many efforts have been made to develop breath tests for lung cancer, asthma and Helicobacter pylori infection. However, little studies pay attention to bronchiectasis. High-pressure photon ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (HPPI-TOFMS) is a promising tool for breath testing, because it is highly sensitive, does not require pretreatment of exhaled breath, and holds great tolerance for humidity. In our case-control diagnostic study, we investigated whether a breath test combining HPPI-TOFMS and a support vector machine (SVM) algorithm was able to distinguish patients with bronchiectasis from healthy individuals.
To investigate whether the breath test is able to detect bronchiectasis using breathomics. This study was conducted with a prospective specimen collection, evaluator-blinded, case-controlled clinical study designed to evaluate the accuracy of breathomics to diagnosis of bronchiectasis in adults.