Artificial Intelligence Nanoarray Breathalyzer Technology to Diagnose Diseases
Newly developed nanoarray technology is able to sniff and diagnose up to 17 different types of diseases from our breath alone.
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Prior to modern medicine, smell had been used to diagnose some diseases. Doctors used to smell stool and body odor, as well as breath which contains VOCs that can be associated with various illnesses.
Our fellow kin in the animal kingdom helped as well, like dogs who had an even more acute sense of smell to more accurately detect illnesses. This historical reality has been portrayed in the series Outlander:
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The development of analytical technology that can mimic a "sniff-and-diagnose" ability has been in the minds of inventors and scientists for decades. This fascination develops into sci-fi technology, such as was shown in the movie Richie Rich:
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A new device has been built that identifies unique "breathprints" for each disease. This device can screen breath samples to classify several types of diseases.
Our breath contains oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen, along with 100 other volatile chemical components (VOCs). The amount of VOC exhaled depends on the relative health of an individual. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, over 2000 years ago was teaching students to smell the breath for clues of diseases.
Previous devices have been developed to detect singular diseases, like cancer, but a team of dozens of people in 14 departments worldwide created a breathalyzer for detecting multiple diseases. The study used a total of 2,808 breath samples collected from 1,404 subjects, divided in one group with one disease categorized as either cancerous, inflammatory, or neurological, and another group of healthy controls.
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This breathalyzer has an array of nanoscale sensors to detect individual components in breath samples. Using artificial intelligence techniques, the team was able to classify and diagnose 17 diseases:
lung cancer, colorectal cancer, head and neck cancer, ovarian cancer, bladder cancer, prostate cancer, kidney cancer, gastric cancer, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, idiopathic Parkinson’s, atypical Parkinsonism, multiple sclerosis, pulmonary arterial hypertension, pre-eclampsia, and chronic kidney disease
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Each disease produces a unique volatile chemical blueprint based on different amounts of 13 components, which were identified through mass spectrometry. The detection is so specific that the presence of one disease does not prevent the detection of others.
This technology presents a practical way to screen and diagnose various diseases through noninvasive, inexpensive and also portable means.
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References:
- Scientists can now sniff out 17 diseases from a single breath sample
- Nanoarray sniffs out and distinguishes multiple diseases
- Diagnosis and Classification of 17 Diseases from 1404 Subjects via Pattern Analysis of Exhaled Molecules
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2016-12-23, 6:01pm
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This is really interesting news! I hope this research will eventually lead to them being readily available and somewhat cheap, so that most people can afford to use one of these at their Doctor's office once every few years or so. However, I still think it will take a long time before we start seeing any of these around, unless some big company finds a way to make a nice profit off them.
Indeed, most advanced tech still has years to develop into something more useful.