AccScience Publishing / JBM / Online First / DOI: 10.14440/jbm.2024.0142
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Exhale-Dx™: A non-invasive, real-time breath analysis system using deep learning for asthma diagnosis

Hanya Ahmed1* Jona Angelica Flavier1 Victor Higgs1
Show Less
1 Department of Research and Development, Applied Nanodetectors Ltd., London N5 2EF, United Kingdom
Submitted: 23 December 2024 | Revised: 3 April 2025 | Accepted: 12 May 2025 | Published: 11 July 2025
© 2025 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

Background: Asthma presents significant diagnostic and therapeutic challenges, impacting millions and posing a substantial burden on healthcare systems, particularly in the United Kingdom, where it afflicts roughly 5.4 million individuals. Severe asthma, incurring over 50% of total expenditures, tends to lead to frequent exacerbations and preventable emergency admissions. Traditional diagnostic methods, primarily based on clinical history, can result in delays and misdiagnoses, culpable for over 1,200 deaths annually, 90% of which are considered preventable with timely intervention. Objective: To address this issue, we developed Exhale-Dx™, a point-of-care breath test platform that provides a non-invasive, user-friendly solution for asthma diagnosis and monitoring. Exhale-Dx™ captures volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in exhaled breath, reflecting real-time metabolic and inflammatory markers of lung function. By analyzing these personalized breath signatures, clinicians and patients can detect exacerbations up to three days in advance, thus facilitating early and targeted interventions to reduce emergency care utilization. The system integrates capnographic waveforms, asthma control scores, and clinical lung function data, offering a comprehensive diagnostic profile. Methods: Using Exhale-Dx™ data, we developed the Asthma Diagnostic Enhanced Neural Architecture (ADENA), an advanced deep neural network that leverages VOC biomarkers and lung function data to enhance diagnostic precision. Results: ADENA achieved exceptional performance, delivering 98.7% accuracy, an F1 score of 0.98, and a low mean squared error of 0.065. The deconvolution analysis further confirmed the model’s ability to detect significant physiological differences between asthmatic and non-asthmatic profiles. Conclusion: Our findings showed that VOC analysis combined with advanced neural networks could accurately distinguish asthmatic profiles, highlighting their potential for early, non-invasive interventions in respiratory health diagnostics.

Keywords
Asthma
Volatile organic compounds
Diagnosis
Deep neural networks
Funding
None.
Conflict of interest
Hanya Ahmed, Jona Angelica Flavier, and Victor Higgs are employees of Applied Nanodetectors Ltd.
References
[1]
  1. World Health Organization (WHO). Asthma. Fact Sheet; 2023. Available from: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/asthma [Last accessed on 2024 Dec16].

 

  1. Asthma + Lung UK. The Economic Burden of Respiratory Diseases in Europe. Available from: https://www. asthmaandlung.org.uk/economic-burden-report [Last accessed on 2024 Dec 16].

 

  1. Asthma + Lung UK. Asthma Care Crisis: Charity Sounds Siren as Asthma Death Toll Rises. Available from: https:// www.asthmaandlung.org.uk/media/press/releases/asthma/ care/crisis/charity/sounds/siren-asthma-death-toll-rises [Last accessed on 2024 Dec 16].

 

  1. Rutter CE, Silverwood RJ, Pearce N, Strachan DP, Global Asthma Network Study Group. Potential asthma risk factors do not account for global asthma symptom prevalence patterns and time trends in children and adolescents. World Allergy Organ J. 2024;17(6):100917. doi: 10.1016/j.waojou.2024.100917

 

  1. Howe TA, Jaalam K, Ahmad R, Sheng CK, Nik Ab Rahman NH. The use of end-tidal capnography to monitor non-intubated patients presenting with acute exacerbation of asthma in the emergency department. J Emerg Med. 2011;41(6):581-589. doi: 10.1016/j.jemermed.2008.10.017

 

  1. Luo G, He S, Stone BL, Nkoy FL, Johnson MD. Developing a model to predict hospital encounters for asthma in asthmatic patients: Secondary analysis. JMIR Med Inform. 2020;8(1):e16080. doi: 10.2196/16080

 

  1. You B, Peslin R, Duvivier C, Vu VD, Grilliat JP. Expiratory capnography in asthma: Evaluation of various shape indices. Eur Respir J. 1994;7(2):318-323. doi: 10.1183/09031936.94.07020318

 

  1. Spathis D, Vlamos P. Diagnosing asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease with machine learning. Health Informatics J. 2019;25(3):811-827. doi: 10.1177/1460458217723169

 

  1. Higgs V, Ahmed H, Flavier JA. Transforming asthma diagnosis: Point of care (POC) breath test with deep neural networks (DNNs) and nanosensors. Am Thorac Soc. 2024;209:A1380. doi: 10.1164/ajrccm-conference.2024.209.1_ MeetingAbstracts.A1380

 

  1. Gupta Y, Lama RK, Lee SW, Kwon GR. An MRI brain disease classification system using PDFB-CT and GLCM with kernel- SVM for medical decision support. Multimed Tools Applic. 2020;79(43):32195-32224. doi: 10.1007/s11042-020-09676-x

 

  1. Bikku T. Multi-layered deep learning perceptron approach for health risk prediction. J Big Data. 2020;7(1):50. doi: 10.1186/s40537-020-00316-7

 

  1. Jackins V, Vimal S, Kaliappan M, Lee MY. AI-based smart prediction of clinical disease using random forest classifier and Naive Bayes. J Supercomput. 2021;77(5):5198-5219. doi: 10.1007/s11227-020-03481-x

 

  1. Higgs V, Ahmed H, Flavier JA. Late breaking abstract-a point of care (POC) exhaled breath to diagnose asthma. Eur Respir J. 2023;62:PA5312. doi: 10.1183/13993003.congress-2023.PA5312

 

  1. Long F, Peng JJ, Song W, Xia X, Sang J. BloodCaps: A capsule network based model for the multiclassification of human peripheral blood cells. Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 2021;202:105972. doi: 10.1016/j.cmpb.2021.105972

 

  1. Ahmed ST, Danouchi K, Hefenbrock M, Prenat G, Anghel L, Tahoori MB. Spatial-spindrop: Spatial dropout-based binary bayesian neural network with spintronics implementation. IEEE Trans Nanotechnol. 2024;23:636-643. doi: 10.1109/TNANO.2024.3445455

 

  1. Cervantes J, Garcia-Lamont F, Rodríguez-Mazahua L, Lopez A. A comprehensive survey on support vector machine classification: Applications, challenges and trends. Neurocomputing. 2020;408:189-215. doi: 10.1016/j.neucom.2019.10.118

 

  1. Velasquez B, Herring J, Hamid NA. Formally Verified Implementation of the K-Nearest Neighbors Classification Algorithm. In: Brazilian Symposium on Formal Methods. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland; 2024. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-78116-2_9

 

  1. Huang M. Theory and implementation of linear regression. In: 2020 International Conference on Computer Vision, Image and Deep Learning (CVIDL). United States: IEEE; 2020. doi: 10.1109/CVIDL51233.2020.00-99

 

  1. Lyu Z, Rodrigues MRD. Exploring the impact of additive shortcuts in neural networks via information bottleneck-like dynamics: From resnet to transformer. Entropy (Basel). 2024;26(11):974. doi: 10.3390/e26110974

 

  1. Ishihara K, Matsumoto K. Comparing the robustness of resnet, swin-transformer, and MLP-mixer under unique distribution shifts in fundus images. Bioengineering (Basel). 2023;10(12):1383. doi: 10.3390/bioengineering10121383

 

  1. Furusho Y, Ikeda K. Effects of skip-connection in resnet and batch-normalization on fisher information matrix. In: Recent Advances in Big Data and Deep Learning: Proceedings of the INNS Big Data and Deep Learning Conference INNSBDDL2019, held at Sestri Levante, Genova, Italy 16- 18 April 2019. Springer International Publishing; 2020. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-16841-4_35

 

  1. Chang S, Principe JC. Explaining deep and resnet architecture choices with information flow. In: 2022 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN). IEEE; 2022. doi: 10.1109/IJCNN55064.2022.9892065
Share
Back to top
Journal of Biological Methods, Electronic ISSN: 2326-9901 Print ISSN: TBA, Published by POL Scientific