
Breathalyser developed for lung cancer - soundsop
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6107229/Breathalyser-developed-for-lung-cancer.html
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jacquesm
at the end of the article:

"Sniff tests” for cancer have received much publicity in recent years. Dogs
can sniff out people with cancer, but their sensitivity is less than 50 per
cent."

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/01/060106002944.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/01/060106002944.htm)

Has that number quite a bit higher.

"The results of the study showed that dogs can detect breast and lung cancer
with sensitivity and specificity between 88% and 97%. The high accuracy
persisted even after results were adjusted to take into account whether the
lung cancer patients were currently smokers."

I'm thinking that this device has been developed only after realizing that if
the dogs can do it a breathalyser could theoretically do it too, reliability
and reproducibility might be more of an issue using the 'dog' method, I guess
that it is much harder to calibrate a dog.

I wonder where their claim of only 50% sensitivity comes from.

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ankeshk
This is good stuff.

A gross sounding idea: why not fix the urinals and bathrooms with body waste
analyzers? Potential to catch many a diseases early on with those...

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zck
You have to be careful about the false positive rate vs. the incidence.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_paradox> . It might not be a good
idea to do this kind of widespread screening.

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bdfh42
Rather superficial report from the Telegraph. As one might expect from modern
journalism this (and other) similar reports fail to note the very high levels
of false positives and false negatives such a technique would produce. This
'might' be useful as additional evidence but as first line screening it would
simply not work

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jacquesm
The day a mainstream publication will mention such things and where the error
bars were I'm going to be seriously impressed. The general trend over time
seems to be less rather than more 'hard' information.

Even in the science departments of such publications the 'human interest'
angle creeps in more and more. It's closer to science entertainment than it is
to real information that you could apply to something.

In part this is because scientific papers seem to be written and titled to
obfuscate rather than to enlighten, it is rare to see a paper that is so well
written that someone active in a different subfield but interested in the
subject matter would be able to understand even the abstract, forget about
laypeople.

They need to the press to explain these things in terms of everyday use.

Incidentally, Hossam Haick is one of technology reviews top 35 scientists for
2008.

A link with a _lot_ more information on the device and the scientist:
[http://www.technologyreview.com/files/20768/TR35_Hossam_Haic...](http://www.technologyreview.com/files/20768/TR35_Hossam_Haick.pdf?download&track)

