ABOVE: Midas sniffs a urine sample.
EMMA JEFFERY, MEDICAL DETECTION DOGS
With their legendary sense of smell, dogs are adept at identifying the characteristic scents of cancers from breath, urine, and poop. But with trained cancer-sniffing pups in short supply, animals are unlikely to become widely available for routine diagnostics. Instead, Andreas Mershin wants man’s best friend to teach machine learning algorithms to sniff out diseases, and he plans to put this technology into your pocket. Mershin, a research scientist at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, says his eventual goal is to build electronic nose capability into smartphones.
The detection of a cancer signal by electronic noses isn’t a new concept, but those that have been developed so far still can’t match the accuracy of dog’s, says Mershin. To get closer to that ability, Mershin and his interdisciplinary team establish a proof-of-concept method for the integration of canine olfaction ...
