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  • 🚨 Dogs Smell Cancer with 97% Certainty

🚨 Dogs Smell Cancer with 97% Certainty

You can count on your dog's medical prognosis before your doctor's.

August 31, 2023

In Today’s Email:

  • Super Snoots! Dogs are Teaching Machines to Detect Cancer.

  • Playtime just got elevated. The joy every hound deserves.

  • “The Squeeze” aka The Internet’s Best Dog News in 60 seconds.

  • The Last Laugh: What we’re laughing with. Not at.

Together with…

This week, we took playtime to a new level with our friends from PetSmart and their Joyhound ™ toy collection, some of the highest-quality dog toys on the market. Whether our corgi test subjects were wild, curious, project-focused, or mission-driven, PetSmart’s Joyhound playtime arsenal had a toy to scratch every itch. Need to replenish that musty, shredded toy bin? Scroll down to receive a special deal, Juiceheads.

‍🔬 Dogs are Detecting Cancer at a 97% Success Rate

Calling them “super snoots” would be an understatement. Get this: dogs are adept at identifying the characteristic scents of cancers from breath, urine, and poop. The problem? There aren’t enough of them. Cancer-sniffing pups are in short supply, and trained dogs are unlikely to become widely available for routine diagnostics.

Do we need to get ‘em reproducing? Not necessarily…instead, scientists want man’s best friend to teach machine learning algorithms to sniff out diseases, and they plans to put this technology into your pocket. Andreas Mershin, a research scientist at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, says his eventual goal is to build electronic nose capability into smartphones.

The detection of a cancer signal by electronic noses isn’t a new concept, but those that have been developed so far still can’t match the accuracy of dog’s, says Mershin. To get closer to that ability, Mershin and his interdisciplinary team establish a proof-of-concept method for the integration of canine olfaction with machine odor analysis of prostate cancer in a study published February 17 in PLOS ONE.

Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in males, affecting an estimated one in nine men at some point in their lives. A widely used tool for disease detection is prostate-specific antigen testing, but the test often fails to detect the disease or leads to incorrect diagnoses. In the hunt for better diagnostic options, researchers have searched for olfactory biomarkers of prostate cancer in the chemical bouquet of urine samples. One team was able to detect prostate cancer by analyzing urine odors with about 86 percent accuracy.

When did they stumble upon dogs as “cancer catchers”?

The idea of using dogs to detect cancers was first proposed for melanomas in 1989, and since then, canines’ cancer-detecting skills have often outshone machine-based odor analysis—in one 2015 study, disease-sniffing pups detected prostate cancer from urine samples with 97–99 percent accuracy.

Mershin tells The Scientist that he was struck not only by dogs’ disease-sniffing prowess but by the fact that some pups, trained to detect a certain type of cancer, are able to detect other malignancies, despite low similarity in odors among various cancers.

Do they have to be trained to detect a scent?

Well, some untrained pets have even detected cancer in their owners. “[Dogs] don’t go by the list of molecules. . . .They go by the scent character, which means they somehow figure out the cancer essence,” says Mershin. “That blew my mind. No analytical tool to this day can do this because it’s looking at the list of ingredients. Knowing what something is made of isn’t the same as knowing what it smells of.”

Inspired by canines, Mershin and his colleagues sought to develop artificial intelligence that emulated doggie decisions. For their study, the researchers obtained urine from 12 men with biopsy-confirmed high-grade Gleason 9 prostate cancer and 38 men who had negative biopsies. Part of the urine specimens were sent to Medical Detection Dogs in the UK for diagnoses. After training the animals with 5 cancer and 15 non-cancer samples, the researchers used the remaining samples to test Midas’s and Florin’s skills. At each testing run, the dog examined a carousel containing three cancer-negative samples and one cancer-positive sample…

…after getting a whiff of each container of urine, the dog made a selection. A correct choice earned the pup a well-deserved treat. Overall, the dogs showed 71 percent sensitivity and 70–76 percent specificity.

Wait a second, Dog Juice. You said 97% certainty.

Put your pitchforks down! Mershin says the main reason for the moderate accuracy was because they received limited training, due to the limited number of urine samples available.

Mershin says that with additional training, the animals’ skills would have improved. “We weren’t trying to make these dogs go to 99 percent—which we can. Many dogs have been trained to 99 and even 99.8 percent accuracy with COVID and malaria and Parkinson’s and various cancers.” Given the study’s goal of identifying the feasibility of the group’s machine learning approach, Mershin says that the dog’s level of precision was adequate.

So, how can machines adopt this level of efficacy?

Mershin says the team’s eventual goal is to apply its canine-trained machine algorithm to an electronic nose that contains synthetic analogs of animal olfactory receptors that they have patented. But before this tool is ready for smartphones, they need to use many more samples to boost the dogs’ cancer-detecting accuracy and then train the ANN to match this performance.

We can’t smell the future…but we can detect some very good boys (and girls) helping us get there.

A toy for every play phase? Really? Yep…

The average life-expectancy for a toy in our home is approximately 37 seconds… but, is that a bad thing?

Well, if those 37 seconds are spent in total dog nirvana then of course it isn’t. It’s only crippling to us as pet owners when that moment rears its head again and our companions are left companion-less.

We spent an afternoon in the playpen and broke down the 5 phases of play, and you wouldn’t fluffing believe how well PetSmart’s Joyhound toys stood up to the test.

Phase 1: The Zoomies (aka “Tough”)

This is the preliminary jolt of excitement. It’s the electrical current that runs through your dog that can only be cured by grabbing the toy tough enough to whip, jerk and chomp for a playtime appetizer. This is your dog, his toy, and his tunnel vision for pure destruction. “Tough Plush” stood up to the storm, and it came in the form of pizza.

Phase 2: Human Inclusion (aka “Game on”)

Game on! This is when our dogs need us to feel what they’re feeling. They want you to experience this innate sense of joy, and with some of their gas tank autonomously emptied, they’re settled in enough to teach us their rules of playtime. Tug-of-war that didn’t end in fibrous tears, rips or frays? We’re in.

Phase 3: The Textural Adventure (aka “Chew Well”)

Rope fibers have run their course. It’s time to dig that chew palette into wide array of textures and chewing experiences. A rubber chew experience that also dispenses treats? Interest: piqued.

Phase 4: Einstein Mode (aka “Learning”)

It’s at this point that chewing has generated enough saliva and the blood from that jawline has worked itself into the brain. Barbaric playtime was a blast, but our dogs won’t leave until they can solve world hunger. Ok… that’s ambitious, but they were able to find enough treats in this raccoon snuffle puzzle, and we’re just as proud of that accomplishment

Phase 5: The Suckle Sesh (aka “Comfort”)

After some time, the gas tank is empty and the brainwaves are tapped. Comfort is the only desire at this point, and nothing put them in a happier place than being able to mindlessly suckle on a plushy elephant with a squeaker. It was the perfect wrap up to an afternoon in the living room.

Give the tennis ball a rest. Your dog has needs and PetSmart is giving you 15% off to elevate that playtime…

Overheard at a dog park:

❝

“She kept tugging on our walk, and I tried telling her I was scrolling social media.”

“You mean sniffing?”

“Yeah, Tucker…but I had to put it in Ellen’s terms.”

Bentley, 5, and Tucker, 4 - Newark, NJ

“The Squeeze”: Dog News In 60 Seconds

Today’s Last Laugh:

This must be what Disney World “fast passers” feel…

@petlike0

😂😂😂#funny #pet #dog #doglove