Dog Nose to E-Nose in Disease Diagnosis

Koushlesh Ranjan,Rajeev Singh

doi:10.24297/jab.v11i0.7959

Abstract

Dog has natural gift of better smelling power which can be exploited for several purposes and disease diagnosis is one amongst them. The work on the use of dog nose in disease diagnosis is in preliminary stage. The electronic noses/e-noses are sensor based physical devices which are used to detect and analyse the various volatile organic compounds (VOCs) specific for health disorders including cancer to metabolic and infectious diseases. The sensor based disease diagnosis is also in preliminary stage. The data generated through studies conducted on disease diagnosis using one of the best noses of the universe may improve the sensitivity and specificity of existing e-noses to add par and this refined artificial intelligence, web data bases and sophisticated hardware and software may play in future a major role in field of diagnosis, monitoring and surveillance of human and animal diseases.

Highlights

The dog can detect the odour forty-four to thousand times better than the human and up to forty feet underneath the ground
The fifty times bigger folded mucous membrane located right behind the nose and in front of brain compared to postage stamp size in human, and 220 million scent receptors against 5 million in human, which are 40 times more in dog, increase the sense of smell in dog [2]
The crescent shaped vomeronasal organ of dog, which was lost in human in embryonic development have role in detection of sex scent and pheromones [3]

Summary

Introduction

The dog can detect the odour forty-four to thousand times better than the human and up to forty feet underneath the ground. If trained properly, it can sniff out the minute concentration of disease specific odorous volatile organic biomarkers produced in pathological processing of cancer, infectious diseases, metabolic & genetic disorders and emitted in breath, blood, milk, skin and urine samples and can avoid the unnecessary painful procedures on patients and minimize the time and expenditure on diagnosis made through the biopsy and other tests having compromised sensitivity, specificity and predictive values resulting into inadequate/notorious accuracy. The scent receptors of nose constitute an array that responds to a wide range of volatile odorant chemicals and impulse generated in this interaction is transmitted, decoded and discriminated in different odour types in the olfactory bulbs of brain Based on this model, an array of large number of electronic sensors linked to a computer-based pattern recognition system that may respond and recognize a range of specific odorous compounds and aid in disease diagnosis is to be developed and refined. The researchers may find number of reviews on use of e-nose in disease diagnosis

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE PERSPECTIVE

Findings

Conflicts of Interest