Dogs are being trained to detect cancer using their keen sense of smell and artificial intelligence, with a new screening test able to accurately identify four types of cancer in nearly all cases.
Dogs Team Up with AI to Sniff Out Cancer
The test developed by SpotitEarly can detect four types of cancer.
This good dog is part of a new screening test that relies on canine noses and artificial intelligence to sniff out the odor signature of cancer on people’s breath. The dogs’ names are Mars, Moon, and Pluto, and you might say their cancer-sniffing skills are out of this world.
An experimental screening method that paired the dogs with artificial intelligence was able to detect the odor of cancer carried on patients’ breaths. The canine-AI duo was both highly accurate and highly sensitive, successfully spotting four types of cancer in 94 percent of cases, scientists report.
The Power of Canine Olfaction
Canines have amazing olfactory capabilities that allow them to sniff out the faint scents that serve as cancer’s odor signature. For this study, researchers trained Labrador retrievers to smell breath samples and sit if they sniffed breast, lung, colorectal, or prostate cancer.
How it Works
Figuring out whether the dogs are indicating yes or no sounds simple, but consistently reading their body language can be tricky for humans. That’s where AI comes in. The researchers trained an AI model that relies on machine learning and computer vision to interpret the dogs’ cues.
The team partnered with medical centers in Israel to test their system on breath samples from nearly 1,400 participants, 261 of whom had tested positive for one of the four cancer types the dogs trained on. With the help of AI, the doggy detectors picked out 245 of these cases. They rarely called a negative sample “positive” — just 60 out of 1,048 cases.
Future Plans
SpotitEarly is planning a larger clinical trial in the United States and aims to report early results in 2026. The company is now working with beagles for the cancer-detecting work, partly because they’re smaller and easier to train. But Mars, Moon, Pluto, and the other Labradors who worked in the study are still top dogs to the researchers, and continue to contribute to research and development.
The Labs are very beautiful and very friendly, says Assaf Rabinowicz, chief technology officer at SpotitEarly. And “they did a very good job.
- sciencenews.org | Dogs team up with AI to sniff out cancer
