Olfactory systems for medical applications

Prevention strategy is nowadays the main way in the complex issue of medical diagnosis. In this wake, performing non-invasive medical tests oriented to an early diagnosis is one of the challenges for the promotion of new classes of instruments and for a faster intervention on the patient. Clinical chemistry is the starting point of this challenge due to the fact that its scope is the quantification of specific compounds found in urine and blood, known to be related to specific pathologies. This paper will deal with an overview of the electronic nose (EN) applications in medicine and in particular with recent data related to the following pathologies: lung cancer, schizophrenia, melanoma. The design of an appropriate measurement protocol for each of the above mentioned applications is a crucial point of these studies, in order to guarantee the representativeness of the measured samples and the reproducibility of the experiments. The efforts spent so far have produced many stimulant and promising results together with fundamental questions about the real potentialities of this technology in medical fields and about the physiological mechanism involved in the modification of the chemical compounds related to the studied diseases. Results, related to the above-mentioned pathologies, related to the EN application will be illustrated and commented. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.