Collecting samples of exhaled breath from people with a high risk of being diagnosed with lung cancer could potentially be a cheap and non-invasive technique for diagnosing the disease, new research suggests.

Current tests for detecting lung cancer include blood and urine, followed by CT scans and chest radiographs. This potential new method could enable an initial breath test to be given to people at high risk of getting the disease, allowing their symptoms to be quickly assessed.

Previous research has revealed that animals are capable of accurately detecting some diseases from breath tests. Since then, scientists have been attempting to replicate the “electric nose” technology, which would detect different profiles for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in breath samples. This study has been the most extensive to date in an effort to show that the technique might actually be able to be effective as a method of lung cancer screening.

Researchers have not identified which VOCs are linked to different diseases yet, but this latest study does suggest that it is possible for an electronic nose to tell the difference between lung cancer, a variety of other lung conditions and healthy patients.

Researchers from the University of Latvia collected exhaled breath samples from 252 lung cancer patients, 223 patients with other types of lung disease or healthy lungs, 265 non-smokers and 210 smokers.

What researchers found was that in non-smokers, the electronic nose identified 128 of them as having lung cancer correctly and only misdiagnosed five people who didn’t have cancer. In the smoking group the electronic nose identified 144 as having lung cancer correctly and misdiagnosed only five people with the disease.

“We have shown that it is possible to use breath tests to correctly identify lung cancer with a high sensitivity rate. The results of our study take us one step further to understanding this important new technology,” said lead author Maris Bukovskis.

“The major problem with electronic nose technology is that it is individual, and each piece of equipment must be trained to distinguish between odors. This causes a problem of standardizing the practice between different centers. The next step will be to test the practice between different centers to help us think about how we can ensure consistency between all the results.”

A second study conducted by the same research group looked at how VOC compounds were changed by different diseases. These findings shed more light on the mechanisms of lung diseases and how a disease develops and affects people.