Trained dogs can detect cancer and other diseases by smell. A miniaturized detector can analyze trace molecules to mimic the process.

Numerous studies have shown that trained dogs can detect many kinds of disease —  including lung, breast, ovarian, bladder, and prostate cancers, and possibly Covid-19 — simply through smell. In some cases, involving prostate cancer for example, the dogs had a 99 percent success rate in detecting the disease by sniffing patients’ urine samples.

But it takes time to train such dogs, and their availability and time is limited. Scientists have been hunting for ways of automating the amazing olfactory capabilities of the canine nose and brain, in a compact device. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and other institutions has come up with a system that can detect the chemical and microbial content of an air sample with even greater sensitivity than a dog’s nose. They coupled this to a machine-learning process that can identify the distinctive characteristics of the disease-bearing samples.

The findings, which the researchers say could someday lead to an automated odor-detection system small enough to be incorporated into a cellphone, were published on February 17, 2021, in the journal PLOS One, in a paper by Claire Guest of Medical Detection Dogs in the U.K., Research Scientist Andreas Mershin of MIT, and 18 others at Johns Hopkins University, the Prostate Cancer Foundation, and several other universities and organizations.

https://scitechdaily.com/artificial-intelligence-powers-a-disease-sniffing-device-that-rivals-a-dogs-nose/