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Dog Sniffs Out Cancer In Human Urine

Posted by Soulskill on from the and-you-thought-your-job-was-bad dept.

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.

7 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. The Talisman came out when? by rmdingler · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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?

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

    1. Re:The Talisman came out when? by DigiShaman · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      Obviously your primitive sense of smell can't appreciate the wonderful bouquet of such odors that a dog can.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
  2. Why not multiple dogs? by Irate+Engineer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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).

    --

    Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!

    Vote for Bernie in 2016!

    1. Re:Why not multiple dogs? by BennyB2k4 · · Score: 3, Informative

      That theory doesn't hold if all 10 dogs are missing the same 20% due to a common failure mode.

  3. Woof Woof Rooar Woof by Registered+Coward+v2 · · Score: 5, Funny

    What Lassie? Dad has thyroid cancer? I better go call an oncologist.

    --
    I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
  4. Re:the 11.8%? by ganjadude · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
  5. Re:the 11.8%? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.