Health

Machine That Can Smell Cancer Developed

by Paul Conneally | February 21, 2010 at 12:33 am

629 views | 18 Recommendations | 2 comments

Machine That Can Smell Cancer Developed by British Scientists

For some years scientists were perplexed by how dogs seemed to be able to sniff out patients with cancer.

Ancient Chinese and Greek physicians knew about the diagnostic potential of breath now scientists from Cranfield University have now invented a machine that can sniff out cancer reports The Mirror.

The Breathotron can detect changes in the chemicals in patients breath that could indicate that they have a tumour.

The breakthrough comes after research showed that dogs could detect the chemical produced by cancerous tissues - in one study trained dogs only failed to detect the cancer in 14 out of 1,272 attempts.

There is hope that the machine will also be able to sniff out other diseases and it is currently being used by Cheltenham General Hospital which is exploring its use in detecting pneumonia.

The machine has been developed over the past 14 years by academics at Cranfield University in Bedfordshire and will be trialled at hospitals in Gloucestershire. If successful, it could be rolled out to NHS hospitals.

The Breathotron is different to other electronic nose devices in that it uses a single MMOS sensor. Samples containing a single volatile species, acetone, ammonia and isopropanol, were introduced to the Breathotron to establish the lower limits of detection, and investigate the linearity of the sensor response. It was shown that acetone and isopropanol could be detected in the range of 0.1 ppm to 10 ppm.

Brainchild of academics at Cranfield University in Bedfordshire, the Breathotron detects chemical changes in a patient's breath, which doctors say could show they have a tumour and give an earlier diagnosis than is possible