A Sensor That Smells Cancer

Professor Hossam Haick and his colleagues at the Israel Institute of Technology have developed a new artificial sniffer called the NA-NOSE—short for Nanoscale Artificial NOSE—which runs software capable of detecting molecule patterns found in the breaths of people with head, neck and lung cancer. After conducting a test on 87 volunteers, Haick and his team proved that the gizmo could successfully distinguish patients who had the disease from those who did not. In fact, NA-NOSE was so effective that it was even able to identify the particular type of cancer afflicted patients had. [Discovery News]