Robotic nose can detect first sign of disease

Diseases often change human body odour, and being able to pick up on this odour could lead to earlier and more accurate medical diagnoses.

When a healthy cell is attacked by a virus, a toxic by-product is produced. This by-product can be emitted from the body via breath, sweat, or urine.

Modern medical articles have described yellow fever as smelling like raw meat, typhoid as baked bread, and diabetic ketosis as rotten apples.

The problem is that a person’s sense of smell is weak and subjective, so we can’t rely on a human nose to diagnose a patient.

Dogs, have been shown to be the earliest, most accurate disease detectors for anything that we’ve ever tried. So far, many different types of cancer have been detected earlier by dogs than any other technology.

The problem with dogs is that they have to be trained to sniff out each specific disease, and training them is expensive and time-consuming.

Researchers announced they had created a Nano-Nose — a robotic nose powered by AI — that could identify cases of prostate cancer from urine samples with 70% accuracy.

Once we have built the machine nose for prostate cancer, it will be completely scalable to other diseases. 

Nano-Nose is 200 times more sensitive than a dog’s nose when it comes to detecting and identifying tiny traces of different molecules emitted from a human body. 

The team trained the AI on this data, to see if the machine could recognize a pattern between the different data sets. And it did: the machine learned what cancer smells like.

Next, the team need to replicate these results in a bigger study — they are hoping to conduct another study with at least 5,000 samples.

This concept is exciting because it means a powerful way to diagnose diseases could eventually be found in everyone’s smartphones.