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Scientists Develop a Breathalyzer That Detects 17 Diseases With One Breath From a Patient (qz.com)
randomErr quotes a report from Quartz: In the last 10 years, researchers have developed specific sniff tests for diagnosing tuberculosis, hypertension, cystic fibrosis, and even certain types of cancer. A group of global researchers led by Hossam Haick at the Israel Institute of Technology have taken the idea a step further. They've built a device -- a kind of breathalyzer -- that is compact and can diagnose up to 17 diseases from a single breath of a patient. The breathalyzer has an array of specially created gold nanoparticles, which are sized at billionths of a meter, and mixed with similar-sized tubes of carbon. These together create a network that is able to interact differently with each of the nearly 100 volatile compounds that each person breaths out (apart from gases like nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide). Haick's team collected 2,800 breaths from more than 1,400 patients who were each suffering from at least one of 17 diseases (in three classes: cancer, inflammation, and neurological disorders). Each sample of the disease was then passed through the special breathalyzer, which then produced a dataset of the types of chemicals it could detect and in roughly what quantities. The team then applied artificial intelligence to the dataset to search for patterns in the types of compounds detected and the concentrations they were detected at. As they report in the journal ACS Nano, the data from the breathalyzer could be used to accurately detect that a person is suffering from a unique disease nearly nine out of ten times.
Sorry, but you blew a Michael J Fox. I'm going to have to take away your license.
their promises didn't turn out so well for the investors
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Halitosis.
Have gnu, will travel.
But can it tell if someone is drunk or under the influence of drugs? If it can this could be a nice side business for the police.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
which delivers the clicks
We seem to be coming closer by the day to a Star Trek tricorder.
If you drunk so much that it's resulted in 17 diseases, then you have a serious drinking problem.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
is this going be another Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos magical machine that will revolutionize the medical field?
A country that does so much good, I knew that's where that good news was coming from. It's a real shame that they just got sucker punched by the lame ducker.
is "nanometer" outside the vocabulary range of their normal readers? o_O
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Does the article explain which part
goes in your mouth, ear, and butt?
Think about it, 10% chance it gets any one disease wrong and says you have it but you don't. And there are 17 diseases to choose from.
I suspect your average faith healer would do better.
Slashdot SUCKS ass.
I don't think it is a 10% false positive rate, but if so that would be great. From the description, it sounds like the cost per test would be very low after economies of scale are realized. Therefore, the doctor could use this as a routine part of the annual checkup. If the machine says "Parkinson's is likely", then the doctor would know to investigate the possibility of Parkinson's. Many (most?) of the routine screening tests aren't definitive - they provide evidence that the doctor will then follow up on.
Have you ever had a throat culture? The doctor did a culture because there was some evidence of an infection that could be definitely diagnosed by a culture. First there's the screening which tells the doctor which more reliable (and expensive) tests should be run, THEN you run the more reliable test.
sounds like a very small sample size for an AI/ML training for predicting this number of categories.
how many were in the control group?
how distinct are the patterns given by each type of disease?
I've been working in this field for a long time. If you look around the literature, you'll see my name on several papers on nanoelectronic detection of disease via breath. This is a great demo, and Haik is a very good guy in this field, but he's done only the easiest part. I've learned the hard way that publishing an academic paper and making something that doctors actually would buy to make treatment decisions are completely different things. This is the first step in the development process, not the last.
In this case, there are already medical breath tests, and entire clinics devoted to this kind of medical test (without the nanotech part). The tools are already cleared for use, and medical doctors have protocols and billing methods for using them. If the key part of this is really those 13 compounds, there's no need for nano wizardry; use the mass spec or whatever that the clinic already has. That's really the key here, why would anyone use his device, and not just his results? Often in sensor research, we don't understand the distinction there when the results get us such great publications and press. The grant manager paid for the nanotechnology (and the citations that come with it), but everyone else is interested in the medicine.
As a hypochondriac I'd be scared to take this test. Best case, I have one or all of these diseases. Worst case, I have no clue what I'm dying from.
Am I the only one who cringes when they read what is (clearly?) a neural network conflated with artificial intelligence?
To me, an artificial intelligence method can explain/justify its ``reasoning''; neural networks cannot.
It's commonly referred to as ``reading the tea leaves''. Or am I just being a snob?
Error: NSE - No Signature Error
That way i would feel safer on one night stands and fucking hookers.
A fart would probably tell them a lot more.
If my buddies are any indication, they died years ago from various loathsome diseases, and are sending back evidence to their still-ambulatory bodies about what the air is like in hell.
Or maybe China.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
will never let us have this like all of the other breakthroughs you read about weekly. They are truly the party of death.
I'm sorry, but a 10% false positive rate is terrible, especially for screening purposes.
For example:
Lets assume that a true diagnosis for disease X is at a rate of 10 in 100,000 people per year (fairly reasonable incidence rate for a lot of diseases).
Assuming there are no false negatives, the number of diagnoses that are made using the test will be:
Number of true positives + 10% of the true negatives
Number of true positives = 10
Number of true negatives = 99,990
# of diagnoses made = 10 + 0.10*99,990
= 10,009
The 9999 false positives would have to have further follow up tests and possibly erroneous treatment. This then of course puts a significant financial burden on the heathcare system.
and to add to my own post:
There are 17 diseases that the breath analyser detects, if each has a false positive rate of 10%, we have the following:
9999 * 17 = 169,983 false positives per 100,000 people per year.
It'd be like one of those kids' athletic competitions, everyone gets a prize.
And charge you $5000 to take the test because you are not insured.... They have gotta keep that money rolling in.
"The team then applied artificial intelligence"
or...ran it through a program?
or...applied an algorithm?
Some diseases have an incubation period of thirty and more years. But they can be diagnosed very early by modern medical tools and be a good source of an income for doctors and clinics.
Thanks for that; this is what most people don't get about the term "false positive rate". In your example, if you are diagnosed by the machine as having one of the diseases, the odds that the machine is wrong (i.e. that you don't have the disease after all) is .999 Most people figure it's 0.1 (the false positive rate)
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Thanks. What I was thinking of, I have now learned, is called the "false discovery rate". FDR is "10% of the samples flagged positive were actually negative". If a test is cheap, a 10% FDR os okay, a 10% FPR is not, (unless perhaps a large percentage of samples actually are positive).
I just studied the two for a few minutes to get an idea of which rate is most useful to consider for the tests I create. It seems false DISCOVERY rate is often useful when there are many tests done on a relatively small number of samples. That somewhat describes my testing - I test for about 90,000 hypotheses (90,000 conditions) on approximately 90,000 samples. I normally think about "what percentage of our positives are false? (FDR)" and it seems that's appropriate for the testing we do.
Indeed I was thinking of the false discovery rate - what percentage of positive results are false. After doing some reading, I just learned that false discovery rate is most useful when testing a small number of samples for many conditions. False positive rate is most useful when testing a large number of samples for a small number of conditions.
That's interesting to me because I develop a testing system that tests for about 90,000 conditions and tests about 90,000 "patients". My patients are computers, and I test for 90,000 different security weaknesses.
Don't kiss that guy.
I don't mind dying. I mind breathing into your fucking breathalyzer.
You ass-holes trying to make a buck off our living and dying, just go away, and leave us alone.
I'm on whichever side doesn't practice eugenics.
This has been done already.
2003 - http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl034220x
2006 - http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/asp/jnn/2006/00000006/00000003/art00001
2008 - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.200704488/full
And likely a hundred more. This isn't new at all, from an academic perspective.
Now if they could actually commercialize this, and make it with high yield and cosnistency so the product could be profitable, which is going to be next to impossible with carbon nanotubes, then it's new. But this is just a re-tread of old science.
They just have a hard time communicating the results. Somebody should work on that part.
That's nice, but I'll settle for a breathalyzer that can be scrutinized by anyone but the manufacturer in court. I'm not sure I trust a DUI conviction to a black box nobody can look inside including the courts.
You mis-spelled $50,000.
I can't necessarily comment on other diseases in the list, but it's absurd to claim that a person's blood-pressure is detectable by breath.
The smart money says this is fake.
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
that bad, you? born the color of excrement?
Single breath analysis sounds hype-py. I would go for a series of tests at specified intervals for each disease. It also seems to be biased toward the presence of fecal matter in breath, but such can come from bad food, organics or specialty cafeteria coffee chain coffee... Ahem, anyway, assumptions also seem detached from actual hypothesis -mechanisms on the relation between diseases and breath presence of chemicals. Like they run an AI associative network and called it results? Surely several other molecules can be detected with organometallic devices... So overall sounds a good idea with bad scientists. Though what seems alarming is that if I use that device after and before a meal AND IT DETECTS COLON CANCER, chances are I can sue the place for mixing excrement in food! Still to achieve epidemiological levels they should use a bigger sample, five thousand at least over a number of periods. But they would be infringing Afroarab interests if we can show a place gave me bad breath out of bad hygiene or worse practices.