Volatile Organic Compound Assessment in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma (VAPOR2)

A multicentre double-blind external validation study to validate the breath test to detect PDAC in 6079 adult participants referred from primary care with potential underlying pancreatic cancer, whereby the VOC analyst in the laboratory and the statistician and bioinformatician classifying the VOC profile into cancer/no-cancer will be blinded to the definitive diagnosis of cancer/no-cancer at the time of analysis. Additionally, the radiologist and/or pathologist reporting the reference test (CT, MRI, biopsy) will not have access to the breath test results at any point. Breath test analysis and definitive diagnoses will be held in separate datasets, which will be cleaned and locked before being combined for analysis. The lead statistician will be unblinded at the interim analysis and at the end of the study after the final database lock once all the study data has been collected and cleaned, to calculate the accuracy of the prediction models.