Dog Sniffs Out Cancer In Human Urine

randomErr writes: University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences found out that a scent-trained dog can identify thyroid cancer in human urine samples 88.2 percent of the time. Frankie, a male German shepherd mix identified the presence of cancerous cells in 30 out of 34 samples. The shepherd was only slightly less accurate than a standard thyroid biopsy. This offers the possibility of a cheaper, less invasive approach to diagnosis of the illness said Donald Bodenner, M.D., PhD, the study's senior investigator.

Comments

the 11.8%?

[Anonymous Coward]

are they false positives or failure to detect?

if it's false positives, that'll get found later....... not a big deal.

if it's a complete miss-- ouch...

Re:the 11.8%?

[ganjadude]

good point. but I think it would make more sense to do things like this

dog sniffs - finds nothing, get a second opinion. I think when it comes to cancer and other bad diseases a second opinion is always warranted.

Re:the 11.8%?

[ShanghaiBill]

Another thing that would make sense would be to try other dogs, including other breeds. Then give them more training. Then mate the best cancer detectors. Within a few generations (2 years/generation for dogs) we could likely get the error rate below 5%. That is better than the biopsy, andlthough the dogs may have false positives, so can the biopsy.

The Talisman came out when?

[rmdingler]

The canine olfactory organ is thousands of orders of magnitude more sensitive than ours... identifying drugs, bombs, and cancers is rudimentary to our best friend.

Yet, despite this superpower, they choose roll around in the foulest smelling dead shit they can find.

Are there smells we cannot appreciate in the same vein that there are sounds we cannot hear?

Why not multiple dogs?

[Irate Engineer]

Why just one dog (and why Frankie)?

Why don't they use 10 dogs and run the sample by each? If 9 out of 10 dogs agree that the sample indicates cancer, wouldn't that reduce the potential for missed diagnoses or false positives? No risk of adverse affects unlike biopsies (unless you're allergic to dogs).