Exhaled breath analysis using on-line preconcentration mass spectrometry for gastric cancer diagnosis.

Breath volatile biomarkers are capable of distinguishing patients with various cancers. However, high throughput analytical technology is a prerequisite to a large-cohort study intended to discover reliable breath biomarkers for cancer diagnosis. Single-photon ionization (SPI) is a universal ionization technology, and SPI-mass spectrometry (SPI-MS) shows a remarkable advantage in the comprehensive detection of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), in particular, nonpolar compounds. In this study, we have introduced SPI-MS coupled with on-line thermal desorption (TD-SPI-MS) to demonstrate nontarget analysis of breath VOCs for gastric cancer patients. The breath fingerprints of the gastric cancer patients were significantly distinct from that of the control group. Acetone, isoprene, 1,3-dioxolan-2-one, phenol, meta-xylene, 1,2,3-trimethylbenzene, and phenyl acetate showed higher relative peak intensities in the breath profiles of gastric cancer patients. A diagnostic prediction model was further developed by using a training set (121 samples) and validated with a test set (53 samples). The predication accuracy of the developed model was 96.2%, and the area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operator characteristic curve (ROC) was 0.997, indicating a satisfactory prediction ability of the developed model. Thus, by taking gastric cancer as an example, we have shown that TD-SPI-MS will be a promising tool for high throughput analysis of breath samples to discover characteristic VOCs in patients with various cancers.

Numerical Study on the Gas-Solid Flow in a Spouted Bed Installed with a Controllable Nozzle and a Swirling Flow Generator.

The swirling flow technology is adopted on a nozzle of the spouted bed in order to enhance the radial movement of the particles. The hydrodynamic characteristics in a spouted bed with a swirling flow generator installed on the nozzle are numerically investigated based on the two-fluid model (TFM). The traditional spouted bed and spouted bed with an integral swirling blade nozzle (ISBN) are simulated and analyzed. Numerical results show that the dead zone at the cone region of the annulus can be effectively eliminated by using the ISBN. The maximum decrease in particle concentration near the cone region is 72%, and the ISBN structure can significantly improve the comprehensive fluidization degree of the spouted bed when γ equals 86°. The turbulent kinetic energy of gas can be significantly increased by the swirling flow along the radial direction in the spouted bed, especially in the spout region. Also, the swirling flow can promote the radial velocity and granular temperature of the particles in the spouted bed, which is helpful to the radial mixing of particles and gas phase between the central spout and the annulus in the spouted bed. There exists a value of ξ (equals 0.526), which brings the greatest elimination effect of the flow dead zone in the annulus of the limited spouted bed space, and the overall fluidization of the spouted bed has the best performance when ξ = 0.316.

Experimental Study on Gas-Solid Flow in the Spouted Bed under Longitudinal Vortex Effect.

To strengthen the particles radial movement and mixing, the longitudinal vortex generator of a sphere was adopted in the spouted bed in this study. To find the influence of the longitudinal vortex and particle properties on axial and radial velocities of particles in a 152 mm-diametered spouted bed, particle image velocimetry (PIV) was employed. The experimental results show that the addition of the longitudinal vortex generator caused the vortex movement of high-speed gas and induced a considerable secondary fine vortex in the cross section of the spouted bed, and the existence of longitudinal vortex significantly improved the radial velocity of particles, compared with that of the conventional spouted bed. Due to the effect of longitudinal vortex on particles, the phenomenon of early dropping of particles was increasingly obvious with the rise in bed height, and the value of axial velocity of particle phase was negative. With the decrease in the particle diameter, the longitudinal vortex effect of gas-driven particle movement would be enhanced. The longitudinal vortex could enhance particle velocity under a wide range of particle diameters, and the enhancement factor η decreased with the rise in the particle diameter and gradually approaches to 1.