Exhaled breath metabolomics: Clinical diagnostic applications, technological evolution and translational challenges
H. Liu, D. Li, Y. Xia, Y. Li
Abstract
From Breath Biomarkers to Clinical Validation
This review examines the clinical potential of exhaled-breath metabolomics, covering mass-spectrometry approaches, including SESI-MS, sensor technologies and machine-learning methods. Across cancer, respiratory and infectious diseases, it highlights promising disease-associated breath signatures but identifies major barriers to routine use, including sampling variability, limited external validation and uncertain biomarker specificity. The authors position breath analysis as a complement to established diagnostics and call for standardised protocols, prospective multicentre studies and clinically interpretable models.