A Deep Learning Approach for Detecting Liver Cirrhosis from Volatolomic Analysis of Exhaled Breath

Introduction: Liver disease such as cirrhosis is known to cause changes in the composition of volatile organic compounds (VOC) present in patient breath samples. Previous studies have demonstrated the diagnosis of liver cirrhosis from these breath samples, but studies are limited to a handful of discrete, well-characterized compounds. Methods: We utilized VOC profiles from breath samples from 46 individuals, 35 with cirrhosis and 11 healthy controls. A deep-neural network was optimized to discriminate between healthy controls and individuals with cirrhosis. Results: A 1D convolutional neural network (CNN) was accurate in predicting which patients had cirrhosis with an AUC of 0.90 (95% CI: 0.75, 0.99). Shapley Additive Explanations characterized the presence of discrete, observable peaks which were implicated in prediction, and the top peaks (based on the average SHAP profiles on the test dataset) were noted. Conclusion: CNNs demonstrate the ability to predict the presence of cirrhosis based on a full volatolomics profile of patient breath samples. SHAP values indicate the presence of discrete, detectable peaks in the VOC signal.