Disease-Sniffing Device Rivals a Dog's Nose

Trained dogs can detect many kinds of disease — including lung, breast, bladder, and prostate cancers and possibly COVID-19 — simply through smell. But it takes time to train such dogs and their availability and time is limited. Researchers have come up with a system that can detect the chemical and microbial content of an air sample with even greater sensitivity than a dog's nose. They coupled this to a machine-learning process that can identify the distinctive characteristics of the disease-bearing samples.