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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.
Here is the list of detected diseases from the source report. ;
lung cancer, colorectal cancer, head and neck cancer, ovarian cancer, bladder cancer, prostate cancer, kidney cancer, gastric cancer, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, idiopathic Parkinson’s, atypical Parkinsonism, multiple sclerosis, pulmonary arterial hypertension, pre-eclampsia, and chronic kidney disease.
We've known dogs can accurately detect several cancers by smelling a person's breath for almost a century. India is beginning to use rats (they're easier to train and have a more sensitive nose) as an auxiliary screening system for things like tuberculosis, with results generally more accurate than screenings by human experts. And he sensitivity of electronic "noses" has been advancing rapidly, so it seems perfectly reasonable that they could achieve similarly impressive results, with the added advantage that they offer objective, quantitative results that lend themselves to easy analysis and lookup, without any individual training needed.
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The summary only gives the rate for people that have the disease, if you want to know the false positive rate you'll have to read the actual report.
Also, the article says they consider it a good proof of concept but still far away from being used in actual diagnosis.