Designing a Nano Nose To Detect Disease as Well as Dogs Can

Dogs have a legendary sense of smell. It’s used for solving crimes and in medicine. Dogs have proven very good at detecting diseases like cancer, diabetes –even COVID-19 -- in human tissue or urine samples. There are even stories of dogs sensing that something’s up with a human owner before doctors have picked up on the early stages of some serious cancers. MIT researcher Andreas Mershin is designing an artificially intelligent system of sensors to mimic how dogs smell. Mershin has discovered that he can train his machine just like you train a dog to recognize the scent of a specific disease. (Segment produced by Abby Haralson)