This AI Dog Can Detect Disease by Sniffing

Dogs can be trained to detect everything from bombs to cancer, but researchers have taken this idea a step further.

Oly stephen
4 min readJan 17, 2022
image by farid ghanbari on pinterest

What if dogs could become your doctor? Well, now they can. Thanks to an incredible AI dog, who has mastered the sense of smell, these animal companions are now capable of sniffing out and detecting disease in a human host.

Dogs can be man’s best friend when it comes to sniffing out disease. They are often used as service animals to help detect certain kinds of cancer and sometimes diabetes by smelling a person’s breath or urine. But what about machines? A new artificial intelligence (AI) system, called “Deep Sniff”, can smell and differentiate between the scents of healthy and sick individuals, tracking changes within six hours. This means that it could potentially one day be used to prevent the onset of debilitating diseases.

Investigators have trained a machine-learning algorithm to recognize the smell of sepsis, which is a life-threatening complication from an infection that can affect any part of the body.

The new method could be used to diagnose sepsis in critical care settings where access to lab tests may be delayed, like in a rural hospital or during natural disasters. In addition, it could help in the diagnosis of other conditions that affect the lungs and airways.

It was found that dogs have a much more sensitive sense of smell than humans, who can only smell one or two parts per million. Dogs, on the other hand, can smell one part per trillion.

The researchers programmed the artificial intelligence to analyze the odour samples and then learn to recognize the differences between healthy and sick people. This was done by taking samples from patients with lung cancer and comparing them with those from healthy people. The results show that the AI has a nearly 90 per cent accuracy rate in determining whether someone is sick or not.

The bot is still in the research phase, so it’s not quite ready for clinical use — it’s able to identify scents after they’re separated from other chemicals in the breath sample, but it can’t yet identify them directly. For example, it’ll know that a certain scent is related to breast cancer cells and may be able to tell if there are a lot of cells present in a sample, but it won’t be able to say how many cells are present without further analysis.

The military in America is already planning to use this AI dog as a bomb detector. They can use this robot for saving their own soldiers from getting killed by detecting bombs or mines before entering an area where there might be bombs planted by enemies. The police departments can also use this robot as a drug detector at airports or other places where they suspect drugs to be hidden. This will help them catch more people carrying drugs.

Other Things I Think This New AI Bot Will Be Used For.

  • Finding lost people in a crowd. Do you know how dogs find lost people in a forest or city? Well, I think this bot should do that too. Just plug in the person’s scent and off it goes to find them.
  • Anti-theft system on laptops. If your laptop gets stolen, all a police officer would have to do is plug in your scent and your laptop would start barking so you can track where it is.
  • Detecting intruders when you’re away from home. If you want to keep intruders out of your house while you’re gone, just put some of your clothes near the door when you leave and plug their scent into the AI dog the next time you return.
  • It will also be used to analyze athletes’ breath after they’ve been playing a sport so that it can tell if someone has been using steroids or other illegal substances.

Though there are countless ways in which this research could be used to advance medicine, there are also a lot of opportunities for misuse. That being said, AI technology is often flawed in such a way that it can spin wildly out of control before being put on hold. I’m not saying that we should fear the dog sniffs of tomorrow, but advancement in both medicine and technology generally requires an active human discussion about priorities and the pursuit of knowledge. If we ever develop technology that can save lives or cure disease, then we need to take the necessary precautions to protect those advances from falling into harmful hands.

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Oly stephen

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