
Rocket Men: Analyzing the breath of critically ill children at warp speed - lermontov
http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2015fall/rocket-men.html
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Mz
This is fantastic:

 _The major weakness of the ammonia blood test is that by the time the results
are received by a treating physician, it is hour-old information that may not
represent the true ammonia levels of a patient. The breath analyzer enables
super-fast, repeatable testing so ammonia levels can be verified and treatment
can begin immediately._

And:

 _Spearrin didn’t realize how hard this project was supposed to be until he
called a respected expert on hyperammonemia for advice. Before Spearrin could
ask his questions, the expert said, “You’ve chosen a horribly challenging
project because ammonia is the most difficult molecule to measure and newborns
are the most difficult patient population to work with.”

Spearrin replied, “But we’ve already built a working proto­type and we’ve
tested it on two patients.”_

And:

 _In just a year, the team had gone from a rough idea on paper to a working
prototype, patient-tested. This is warp speed in the medical device world._

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cperciva
It's a shame that this only works with volatiles. A blood glucose breathalyzer
would be awesome, not to mention a $B/year market.

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gus_massa
I think that detecting glucose in the air is impossible, but perhaps it can
detect some byproduct that is produced during a glucose spike. I guess
something like alcohol.

(For example, yeast produce a small amount of alcohol from glucose, because it
doesn't use enough oxygen to transform it to carbon dioxide. At the low level,
people is not _so_ different of yeast. :) So this or a similar approach may
work.)

IANAB/MD/...

~~~
cperciva
Unfortunately signals like that would get swamped by the effects of oral and
gastric flora. This is how Helicobacter pylori is detected, in fact.

