Disease detection device could rival accuracy of canine nose
Researchers have developed a device with greater sensitivity than a dog’s nose, aiming for more accurate disease detection in lab samples.
The findings, which researchers said could someday lead to an automated odour-detection system small enough to be incorporated into a mobile phone, have been published in PLOS One. The paper is authored by Clare Guest of Medical Detection Dogs in the UK, research scientist Andreas Mershin of MIT, and 18 others from various universities and organisations including Johns Hopkins University and the Prostate Cancer Foundation.
Studies have shown that trained dogs can detect diseases including various types of cancer, and potentially COVID-19. In some cases, involving prostate cancer for example, dogs had a 99 per cent success rate in detecting the disease by sniffing patients’ urine samples.
Training dogs is time-consuming, and scientists have been looking for ways to automate the olfactory capabilities of the canine nose and brain in a compact device. The system developed by the team at MIT and other institutions has been coupled to a machine-learning process that can identify distinctive characteristics of the disease-bearing samples.
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