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Electronic nose to sniff diseases |
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Update |
A new way to diagnose diseases may be
there in the near future. We may see an Electric Nose to
sniff diseases. Scientists at Cranfield University in the UK are taking a different approach to diagnosing urinary tract infections: they're sniffing out disease using an electronic device called the 'Diag-Nose'. This instrument "has been used for assessing the quality of food in the food industry for some years," Dr Selly Saini said in an interview with Reuters Health. To detect urinary tract infections, Saini and associate Jan Leiferkus mix urine with a special growth medium that contains certain compounds. When the bacteria causing the infection eat the compounds, they produce characteristic odours that are detected by the electronic nose, Saini explained. Urinary tract infections are a problem, Saini says, because in this age of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, doctors usually do not prescribe antibiotics until they make a diagnosis, which can take up to 2 days. He said that the new method can detect the organisms that cause disease in 5 or 6 hours. The first clinical trial using the Diag-Nose for urinary tract infections has been going on for about 2 months, and "so far, it's looking very promising," Saini said. This is a short-term study, he noted, but if things look good he and Leiferkus will begin a much larger, multicenter trial that will enroll thousands of patients. And the investigators are not stopping at urinary tract infections. "If you can identify the various odours for a disease, in principle you should be able to detect that disease using this electronic nose technology," Saini said. He and his colleague are also looking at tuberculosis, gastric conditions such as ulcers, and cancers that could potentially be diagnosed through the breath, such as esophageal or lung cancer. Reuters
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