Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other institutions have created a system that can detect diseases.

According to an article on MIT News, the system partners with a machine-learning process which identifies characteristics of disease in samples provided. 

Studies in the past have shown that diseases such as lung and breast cancers can be detected by trained dogs through using their sense of smell. In performing this exercise, the team believe that this detection system is 200 times more sensitive than that of a dog’s nose.

“Dogs, for now 15 years or so, have been shown to be the earliest, most accurate disease detectors for anything that we’ve ever tried. So far, many different types of cancer have been detected earlier by dogs than any other technology,” says Andreas Mershin, who is a Research Scientist at MIT.

The latest tests performed on the system showed a success rate of more than 70% when analysing 50 samples of urine from confirmed cases of prostate cancer. The same samples were analysed by trained dogs courtesy of Medical Detection Dogs in the UK, with their results matching those that were achieved by MIT’s system.

“We knew that the sensors are already better than what the dogs can do in terms of the limit of detection, but what we haven’t shown before is that we can train an artificial intelligence to mimic the dogs, and now we’ve shown that we can do this. We’ve shown that what the dog does can be replicated to a certain extent,” said Mershin.

The team hope that this piece of technology, which is compact in size, will increase the chance of scent detectors to be incorporated into smartphones in the future.