Machine learning applied to functionalized graphene sensors for noninvasive detection of renal diseases

Breath biomarker detection has been a significant non-invasive approach for disease diagnosis. This method has significant potential for early diagnosis and accurate analysis of diseases. Emission from breath contains several volatile organic compounds. Among them, ammonia is a very commonly found VOC and mainly responsible for chronic kidney diseases. There exist several strategies to detect ammonia, however they demonstrate severe limitations such as cross-sensitivity and poor selectivity. This work demonstrates the synergistic effect of sensor functionalization and application of machine learning for selective detection of ammonia in the environment. The sensor exhibits high degree of selectivity towards ammonia owing to enormous hydroxyl groups contributed through curcumin. At 500 ppm ammonia, the sensor demonstrates 274% response and very high selectivity among seven volatile organic compounds. The machine learning models were trained with the help of sensor transients. Random Forest and CNN models were applied to predict the presence of ammonia in a mixture. Random Forest achieved 96.25% accuracy compared to 89% accuracy of CNN. Hence, Random Forest algorithms applied to curcumin functionalized reduced graphene oxide sensors can detect ammonia vapors with very high efficiency among a mixture of gases.