(P 051) NON-INVASIVE DETECTION OF SOFT TISSUE SARCOMA USING VOLATILE ORGANIC COMPOUNDS IN EXHALED BREATH: A PILOT STUDY

Objective: Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) are widely investigated as a new diagnostic biomarker in medicine. The aim of this pilot study is to assess whether an electronic nose can discriminate between patients with and without soft tissue sarcoma (STS) based on VOC profiles in exhaled breath.

Methods: In this cross-sectional pilot study, patients with primary histologically proven STS were included for breath analysis. Healthy persons matched on sex and age and patients with rejected STS were included for the control group. Machine-learning techniques were used to develop the best fitting model. Ten-fold cross-validation was used for internal validation.

Results: Fifty-eight breath samples were collected (29 STS and 30 controls) from March 2018 until March 2022. The final model yields an area under the curve of 0.85 with a sensitivity and specificity of 83% (95% CI 64-93) and 60% (95% CI 41-66), respectively.

Conclusion: This study suggests that exhaled VOC analysis could serve as a non-invasive diagnostic biomarker to achieve a higher pre-test probability for STS with a good overall performance. Future studies are needed to validate these promising preliminary findings before VOC analyses could be incorporated in clinical practice.