Slashdot Mirror
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.
I wonder if it can detect cancer with other, err, bodily gas flows...
The key word here is "early". Apparently the device can detect lung cancer early on. The earlier you know sb has cancer, the better you can treat them.
Yes. It's called freedom. Freedom also allows you to do what other people consider to be stupid or immoral. Like, oh, for instance:
drink
eat pork
eat beef
eat any animal
eat anything produced by an animal
have sex before marriage
have sex with someone of the same gender
marry someone outside of your religion
renounce your religion
have an abortion
take contraceptives
and many other things
If you have the right to abort a fetus you have the right to decide whether or not to consume tobacco, wear seat belts and every other aspect that ownership of ones body implies.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
and any other doc-in-a-box.
As long as the smoke doesn't affect anyone else. In most cases, it does.
Because banning addictive substances works 100% of the time with 0 adverse effects.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
...discussed at length here:
http://www.nature.com/articles...
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.
Sounds like the thing just gives a binary yes/no reading. So why bother with the NFC and phone? Why not just have a red/green LED on the device itself?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
If I understand correctly what I'm reading about the biomarker gasses, it's not just the absence or presence of a gas or gasses, but the quantities, and the profile of those quantities in normal vs. diseased lungs. So, they're hooking it up to a pattern classifier. In the prototype stage you need a computer with a fair amount of power --- fortunately these days a smart phone will do. Down the road I imagine they could hook it up to a FPGA or six and eventually engineer it down to one chip, but that's a lot more engineering and likely years down the road.
Finding God in a Dog
Actually... since the tech behind it is based on these sensors and since dogs can already be trained to detect bacteria and prostate cancer by smell, while bladder cancer can be detected by smell as well...
The answer is probably yes.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Now if the police really want to save lives (and not just revenue raise) they will incorporate this into random breath tests (RBT's)
I had a colonoscopy when I turned 50. It discovered a stage 3 adenocarcinoma in the ascending colon. Without a colonoscopy these are generally not found until the colon is blocked or it ruptures - either way the cancer has usually metastasized by this point and the live expectancy is of the order of 18 months to two years.
The day after the colonoscopy a cat scan confirmed the result (not that there was a doubt) and a week later the tumor was removed. The surgery was followed by 6 months of chemotherapy. That was 12 years ago.
A colonoscopy saved my life. It might save yours also. Man up and get it taken care of.
Cigarettes are not the only cause of lung cancer. Lung cancer existed before cigarettes, and will exist even if we ban them. Offhand I can think of a half dozen celebrities and people I know who never smoked but died of lung cancer.
Anything that can damage your DNA can cause cancer - radiation, various kinds of chemicals, viruses, or just errors in replication. All these things can cause cancer in the lungs. While it's true tobacco drastically increases your odds of lung cancer, you still have about a 14/1000 chance of developing lung cancer even if you've never smoked a cigarette and aren't exposed to statistically significant amounts of secondhand smoke, i.e. you don't live with a smoker or tend bar at a smoke-filled pub.
So yes, you need early detection.
Not in the real world, no. It's not like insurance companies would rather pay hundreds of dollars for an X-ray, which is the alternative.
This. A colonoscopy has a bigger statistical impact on your longevity than any other screening test.
I'm a scientist and have worked in the sensor field for a long time. I have had students I've trained attempt this (commercial breath detection of cancer) with promising initial results. It's pretty easy to do the demo these guys are doing. It's very hard to do this with real people. The gap between cool academic demo and manufactured product is huge. The gap between product and FDA cleared diagnostic is even larger.
Nobody should be dictating what an adult is allowed to willingly put in his or her body.
When said willful self-damage causes increased rates of death and illness, which has to be treated by tax-funded services, it is only right for the tax payers to have some say in the matter.
I'm not saying an outright ban is the solution, because it absolutely isn't, but the taxes on self-damage products such as tobacco and alcohol should match or slightly exceed the increased burden placed on public services as a consequence of their use. That plus smoking bans inside workplaces and other places like public buildings, plus information campaigns will not work as an outright ban, but it will help. Enforced plain packaging like in Australia is another good idea, I just wish it could be applied to all products and marketing in general.
And before the smokers get to whine about how "oppressed" they are, they can start by picking up every single goddamn cigarette butt they just throw wherever, out of car windows and on the streets.
Eat the rich.
Someone already made the "21 years" joke.