Laser Spectroscopic Online Monitoring of Volatile Diseasemarkers in Human Breath.

We present an overview of the recent progress on spectroscopic online monitoring of exhaled breath with mid-infrared coherent sources. The current detection limits of laser spectroscopic approaches are in the picomolar to nanomolar range, depending on the molecular compound. The time resolution of the measurements is down to the sub-second range. This very high sensitivity and time resolution open up exciting perspectives for novel analytical tasks in biomedical research and clinical diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]