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Breathalyzer That Detects Lung Cancer Early From a Single Breath Wins $100K Entrepreneurship Competition (mit.edu)
Lung cancer "breathalyzer," developed by a team of MIT and Harvard University students, has won $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. The breathalyzer connects to a smartphone and is able to detect lung cancer early from a single breath, reports MIT News. From the report: Astraeus Technologies has developed a postage-stamp-sized device, called the L CARD, that detects certain gases indicative of lung cancer. When someone blows onto the device, a connected mobile app turns a smartphone screen red if those gases are present and green if they aren't. "The L CARD reacts and sends instantaneous information to the physician that further attention is required," Joseph Azzarelli, an MIT PhD student in chemistry said while a ripple of excitement spread through the crowd. Lung cancer is the deadliest type of cancer in the United States, causing more deaths than breast, colon, and prostate cancers combined, according to the World Health Organization.
One of the problems with such devices is that they don't report the percentage of false positives. This is a much bigger problem than false negatives, since there are more people who are negative (don't have lung cancer) than positive (have lung cancer). It's generally considered very bad to tell someone that they have cancer and then later say "Sorry, but we made a mistake." Though that's good news for them, they get upset that you told them the false bad news first. However, early diagnosis of lung cancer is an important area and if they made progress toward that then I applaud them.