Melanoma volatile fingerprint with a gas sensor array: in vivo and in vitro study

Volatile compounds fingerprinting with gas sensor arrays is a promising non-invasive methodology for human health-state monitoring. Anyway, the large variability of human samples (breath, urine, sweat, skin transpiration) may have a complex influence in the composition of the volatile part and in the reproducibility of the analyses. Nonetheless, skin analysis is a favourable application where each subject can provide its own reference: free skin portions compared with skin lesions, avoiding the masking effects of skin volatiles composition variability. Moreover, in vitro measurements of melanoma cell lines show that enough information to recognize different tumor-types can be obtained by cells headspace.