A portable electronic nose system for the identification of cannabis-based drugs

We report on a research aimed at evaluating the capacity of a simple, low-cost, portable electronic nose system based on commercially available metal oxide gas sensors to classify different types of drugs. Five drugs, namely cannabis buds, cannabis plants, hashish, snuff tobacco and tobacco leaves w...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sensors and actuators. B, Chemical Chemical, 2011-07, Vol.155 (2), p.456-463
Main Authors: Haddi, Z., Amari, A., Alami, H., El Bari, N., Llobet, E., Bouchikhi, B.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Allelochemicals
Cannabis
Data analysis
drugs
Drugs detection
electronic nose
headspace analysis
leaves
multivariate analysis
Pattern recognition techniques
Portable electronic nose
principal component analysis
support vector machines
tobacco
volatile compounds
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Summary:We report on a research aimed at evaluating the capacity of a simple, low-cost, portable electronic nose system based on commercially available metal oxide gas sensors to classify different types of drugs. Five drugs, namely cannabis buds, cannabis plants, hashish, snuff tobacco and tobacco leaves were employed. A dedicated real-time data acquisition system based on dynamic headspace sampling, a microcontroller and a laptop computer have been designed and constructed for this application. To demonstrate its discrimination capability, unsupervised and supervised classification models have been built and validated. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of volatile profiles revealed five distinct groups corresponding to the five different drugs analyzed. This was further confirmed by a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) test. Support Vectors Machines (SVMs) were applied to build a classifier and reached a 98.5% success rate in the recognition of the different drugs analyzed. This work demonstrates for the first time that the electronic nose technology could be successfully applied to the identification of illegal drugs.
ISSN:0925-4005
1873-3077
DOI:10.1016/j.snb.2010.12.047