Programmable Nanoarchitectonics of Pore Array for Electronic-Nose-Based Early Disease Diagnose

In this article, we present a novel electronic nose fabrication process based on highly programmable anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) nanoarchitectonics and ultrasonic spray pyrolysis (USP) deposition. Featuring an ultralow manufacturing cost, the deposited material’s morphology can be accurately controlled with fabricated general-purpose AAO template. Compared with nonstandard lithography-based template fabrication method, the need of complicated Bosch etching process and its associated complex process parameter tuning is eliminated. As a result, the cost-effective mass production of 3-D nanotemplate-based material and devices can be enabled. In addition, the target material’s limited coverage and time efficiency issues widely existing in the previous deposition methods are well-addressed by our customized USP deposition, especially for the 3-D nanotemplate with large surface-to-volume ratio, leading to significantly improved gas-sensing performance. Moreover, the proposed fabrication recipe, together with the adopted gas recognition algorithms based on linear discriminant analysis (LDA), is validated based on the reported extensive measurement results for five gas biomarkers widely exploited for patients’ exhaled gas-sensing and recognition applications. This shows great potential for the early disease diagnose of diabetes, breast cancer, acute lung injury, colon diseases, lung cancer, and so on.