Artificial Odor Discrimination System Using Electronic Nose and Neural Networks for the Identification of Urinary Tract Infection

  • Authors:
  • V. S. Kodogiannis;J. N. Lygouras;A. Tarczynski;H. S. Chowdrey

  • Affiliations:
  • Centre for Syst. Anal., Univ. of Westminster, London;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Current clinical diagnostics are based on biochemical, immunological, or microbiological methods. However, these methods are operator dependent, time-consuming, expensive, and require special skills, and are therefore, not suitable for point-of-care testing. Recent developments in gas-sensing technology and pattern recognition methods make electronic nose technology an interesting alternative for medical point-of-care devices. An electronic nose has been used to detect urinary tract infection from 45 suspected cases that were sent for analysis in a U.K. Public Health Registry. These samples were analyzed by incubation in a volatile generation test tube system for 4-5 h. Two issues are being addressed, including the implementation of an advanced neural network, based on a modified expectation maximization scheme that incorporates a dynamic structure methodology and the concept of a fusion of multiple classifiers dedicated to specific feature parameters. This study has shown the potential for early detection of microbial contaminants in urine samples using electronic nose technology.