Scientists Develop a Breathalyzer That Detects 17 Diseases With One Breath From a Patient (qz.com) 99
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.
Re:Coming soon: parkinsons breathalyzer (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Reminds me of this old joke [cc.com].
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Wow. You really have to feel sorry for that patient. Its a wonder they can generate one breath.
Wow. These are no small potatoes. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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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.
No, worst-case, you have all those diseases PLUS you're dying from ones that it can't test for!
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Although to detect diseases 2, 9, 10, and 11 - you have to "blow" in a somewhat different manner.
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And you have cancer but if you punch me in the face I can get you the jail / prison will the really good doctors at no cost to you other then being in lock up for a some time.
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I'm on whichever side doesn't practice eugenics.
The next Theranos? (Score:4, Interesting)
their promises didn't turn out so well for the investors
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Re: The next Theranos? (Score:1)
The same goes for the breathalyzer. How can you hope investors stay clear of obvious future life saving technology? Are you pharmaceutical propagandists?
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18 Actually (Score:5, Funny)
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came here, ctrl-f
Leaving satisfied.
--
BMO
Wow. (Score:2)
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.
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But the cost of jail / prison having to cover
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. Is a lot more then the cost of the what the state makes of drug / dui cases.
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Oh cool so then they would be able to weed out unprofitable arrests!
Sir we see you just plowed into a schoolbus and killed 20 people but we see you have this medical condition that's going to cost our department several milion dollars to treat just so you can stand trial so were letting you off with a warning drive safe ok?
I think it's odd that criminals are entitled to at least a minimal amount of healthcare even if they aren't entitled to food that's not moldy.
It might increase early detection and decreas
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is off topic, but worth a response. I've been to prison (hence the AC post), and I can tell you first hand that the health care in prisons is just as, if not more so, inadequate as the food. It is sad that the average food expenditure for inmates in the prison I was in was less that $1.25/day as reported by the state, while the guard dogs got almost $4/day, health care costs are worse. Treatment is given by unqualified doctors with medical degrees from over seas, or people who couldn't get a job anywhere else in health care because they suck so bad. We had one doctor nicknamed "Dr. Death" because he constantly mistreated inmates and would kill a couple every year. The bodies piled up, but nobody cared because only criminals were dieing. Mental health treatment is even worse. Inmates with mental health issues are very commonly given large doses of anti-psychotics, seroquil, clozapine, and thorazine just to keep them in unconscious or barely conscious. I saw a lot of guys with the thorazine shuffle because they had been taking it for extended periods of time. The psych ward was full of guys pissing and crapping on them selves because of the drugs, who were not taken care of or cleaned up. U.S. Prison health care is a disgrace.
Care is very odd though, while inmates were being overdosed, misdiagnosed, even killed, transsexual men who were on hormone injections before being convicted got state sponsored hormone injections for the duration of their incarceration. Someone sued to get their hormones, but no one sues because their father, brother, son, was killed in prison because they can't afford it or prove it as deaths are covered up.
I was diagnosed with Bi-Polar disorder in prison, to deal with it the prison doctors prescribed huge doses of lithium which eventually lead to moderate/severe kidney problems. I'm working on 2 1/2 functional kidneys and if anything else goes wrong I will be on dialysis for the rest of my life. My nephrologist said I should have sued for malpractice, but no lawyer would take the case because suing the state never works.
Say what you will about convicted criminals not deserving X, Y or Z because they are the worst people on the planet and should be left to rot, but they are still people, humans, who deserve to be treated better than the dogs used to guard them.
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Sorry I wasn't clear in my intent with that post.
I'm one of those people that thinks healthcare should be a right not a privilege.
That's why I find it odd that we will provide care (or at least we are supposed to) for someone convicted and imprisoned for jaywalking but not someone just walking down the street (unless it's emergency care).
Criminals are at least legally required to be provided with a minimum of care unlike regular non criminals who are only entitled to emergency care. They also happen to be l
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I live in the US so I have no right to health care unless I need emergency care or I take up a life of crime and get put in jail.
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Larry Hagman has got five of them now. And three hearts.
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That's actually a pretty good explanation.
scientists develop the one weird trick (Score:1)
Next step is to connect it to a smartphone (Score:2)
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Vital Technologies of Bolton, Ontario, Canada built one years ago, then promptly went bankrupt.
They claimed they had an EM detector (in the lab, not their commercial tricorder product) sensitive enough to detect the human nervous system at a distance.
Re: Next step is to connect it to a smartphone (Score:1)
I have a doomsday device that will destroy the Earth. I activated it 35 minutes ago. It may take a while...
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You mis-spelled $50,000.
A drinking problem. (Score:1)
Re:Not again... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Israel 8===D~~ (Score:1)
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.
billionths of a meter? (Score:4, Insightful)
is "nanometer" outside the vocabulary range of their normal readers? o_O
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What is a "meter" anyway?
How much is it in nanoinches?
-- an american
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What is a "meter" anyway?
It's a milli-"click".
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And in which order ?
Re:10% false positives is a horrible rate (Score:5, Informative)
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.
If it were 10% false positives, excellent screen (Score:2)
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
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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*9
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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.
I was thinking false discovery rate (Score:2)
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 numbe
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I was thinking false discovery rate (Score:2)
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, a
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Re: 10% false positives is a horrible rate (Score:2)
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For instance mamography for women under 50 about 80%, which is why it is not always recommended for y0unger women.
I was under the impression that the added risk of getting cancer from repeated X-rays over decades was why it isn't done on younger people.
Some countries don't recommend mammograms at all except for high risk individuals, and instead teach young women how to feel for irregularities.
The first step (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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If you want to eliminate neural nets as a form of artificial intelligence, you are going to need to conclude that most human "reasoning" is similarly not really intelligent behavior. Plenty of research shows that humans make most decisions in a manner highly analogous to those in neural nets (and you can predict the result of this "reasoning" by brain monitoring before the subject knows which decision he is going to make). It is true that humans, if challenged, will attempt to justify their decisions, but t
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The term used for the popular recent solutions is "deep learning". To be more specific, the most effective solutions are "guided deep learning". The term "guided" means that the important inputs and outputs are partly chosen by humans trying to tune the learning process. Progress has been rapid in just the last two or three years. Image recognition, for instance, an extremely tough area until very recently, is now pretty much solved. In this area, the next frontier to be cracked is totally independent learn
Let's do this for STD's (Score:1)
That way i would feel safer on one night stands and fucking hookers.
These guys are behind the curve (Score:2)
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.
Re: "artificial intelligence" (Score:1)
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Well, technically it does. But the algorithms are the relatively trivial ones that do the neuron implementations, as opposed to the more traditional algorithmic direct solution.
Re: "artificial intelligence" (Score:1)
White coat black art (Score:2)
Detects 17 Diseases With One Breath From a Patient (Score:2)
Dogs can do this too (Score:1)
Great, but I'll take a validated classic one (Score:2)
Hypertension? Really? (Score:2)
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.