New bladder cancer non-invasive surveillance method based on voltammetric electronic tongue measurement of urine

Summary: Bladder cancer (BC) is the sixth leading cause of death by cancer. Depending on the invasiveness of tumors, patients with BC will undergo surgery and surveillance lifelong, owing the high rate of recurrence and progression. In this context, the development of strategies to support non-invasive BC diagnosis is focusing attention. Voltammetric electronic tongue (VET) has been demonstrated to be of use in the analysis of biofluids. Here, we present the implementation of a VET to study 207 urines to discriminate BC and non-BC for diagnosis and surveillance to detect recurrences. Special attention has been paid to the experimental setup to improve reproducibility in the measurements. PLSDA analysis together with variable selection provided a model with high sensitivity, specificity, and area under the ROC curve AUC (0.844, 0.882, and 0.917, respectively). These results pave the way for the development of non-invasive low-cost and easy-to-use strategies to support BC diagnosis and follow-up.