Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and autoimmune usual interstitial pneumonia (aUIP) share overlapping clinico-radiological features, complicating differential diagnosis. Electronic nose (eNose) technology characterizes exhaled breath profiles (“breathprints”) and may offer a non-invasive diagnostic approach in fibrotic interstitial lung diseases. To evaluate whether eNose breathprint analysis can discriminate between IPF and aUIP. In this cross-sectional study of 60 patients (34 IPF, 26 aUIP), breathprints were analyzed using principal component analysis (PCA, retaining eigenvalues > 1). Group differences were assessed via independent t-tests. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) with leave-one-out cross-validation evaluated the discriminatory performance of PC combinations. PCA identified four principal components, with PC1 explaining 96% of the total variance. PC1 scores were significantly higher in aUIP compared to IPF (mean difference −0.53; 95% CI −1.04 to −0.02; p = 0.04); PC2-PC4 showed no significant differences (p > 0.3). LDA utilizing PC1 and PC3 achieved a cross-validated classification accuracy of 73.3% (95% CI 60.7–84.4, p < 0.05). eNose-derived breathprints showed preliminary discriminatory potential between IPF and autoimmune UIP, supporting further validation of this non-invasive adjunctive approach. Breathomics represents a promising non-invasive adjunctive tool for phenotyping fibrotic interstitial lung diseases, though larger validation studies integrating clinical and biological data are warranted.
Marco et al. (Thu,) studied this question.