Identification of micro-organisms by dint of the electronic nose and trilinear partial least squares regression

Ventilator-associated pneumonia is one of the most lethal infections occurring in intensive care units of hospitals. In order to obtain a faster method of diagnosis, we proposed to apply the electronic nose to cultures of the relevant micro-organisms. This allowed to halve the time of the analysis. In the current paper, we focus on the application of some chemometrical tools which enhance the performance of the method. Trilinear partial least squares (tri-PLS) regression is used to perform calibration and is shown to produce satisfactory predictions. Sample specific prediction intervals are produced for each predicted value, which allows us to eliminate erroneous predictions. The method is applied to an external validation set and it is shown that only a single observation out of 22 is being wrongly classified, so that the method is acceptable for inclusion in the clinical routine.