By Lisa Marshall • Published: April 10, 2023
With each breath, humans exhale more than 1,000 distinct molecules, producing a unique chemical fingerprint or “breathprint” rich with clues about what’s going on inside the body…
This week, scientists from CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) made an important leap forward in the quest to diagnose disease using exhaled breath, reporting that a new laser-based breathalyzer powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can detect COVID-19 in real-time with excellent accuracy… [end quote]
The device is very large so the researchers are working on miniaturization.
There is a crying need for a detector for early-stage lung cancer. (Over 220,000 new cases per year in the U.S.) Currently, the only screening test is low-dose spiral CT scanning which is recommended only for older smokers with a long smoking history. (Such as DH.) It’s not recommended for screening non-smokers, like my mother who died of lung cancer from my father’s second-hand smoke. CT scans are expensive and expose the person to X-rays.
An inexpensive, non-invasive breathalyzer test for Covid and lung cancer would save many lives.
Wendy