Exhaled breath analysis: physical methods, instruments, and medical diagnostics

Abstract

This paper reviews the analysis of exhaled breath, a rapidly growing field in noninvasive medical diagnostics that lies at the intersection of physics, chemistry, and medicine. Current data are presented on gas markers in human breath and their relation to human diseases. Various physical methods for breath analysis are described. It is shown how measurement precision and data volume requirements have stimulated technological developments and identified the problems that have to be solved to put this method into clinical practice.