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. 2014 Jun;8(2):026001.
doi: 10.1088/1752-7155/8/2/026001. Epub 2014 Mar 27.

The use of a gas chromatograph coupled to a metal oxide sensor for rapid assessment of stool samples from irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease patients

S F Shepherd  1 , N D McGuire, B P J de Lacy Costello, R J Ewen, D H Jayasena, K Vaughan, I Ahmed, C S Probert, N M Ratcliffe
Affiliations

The use of a gas chromatograph coupled to a metal oxide sensor for rapid assessment of stool samples from irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease patients

S F Shepherd et al. J Breath Res. 2014 Jun.

Abstract

There is much clinical interest in the development of a low-cost and reliable test for diagnosing inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), two very distinct diseases that can present with similar symptoms. The assessment of stool samples for the diagnosis of gastro-intestinal diseases is in principle an ideal non-invasive testing method. This paper presents an approach to stool analysis using headspace gas chromatography and a single metal oxide sensor coupled to artificial neural network software. Currently, the system is able to distinguish samples from patients with IBS from patients with IBD with a sensitivity and specificity of 76% and 88% respectively, with an overall mean predictive accuracy of 76%.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Examples of typical chromatograms produced from a sample of an ulcerative colitis (a) and an IBS patient (b). Minor gridlines indicate the 30 second time bins divisions used in the ANN analysis.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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