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

Designing a Nano Nose To Detect Disease as Well as Dogs Can Top of Mind with Julie Rose • Season 1, Episode 1730, Segment 4

Nov 12, 2021 • 17m

Dogs have a legendary sense of smell. It’s used for crime-solving 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 serious cancer. MIT researcher Andreas Mershin is designing an artificially intelligent system of sensors to mimic how dogs smell. He recently discovered that he can train his machine just like you train a dog to recognize the scent of a specific disease.

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