AI Can Detect Illnesses in Human Breath
news.developer.nvidia.com
news.developer.nvidia.com
In my opinion, from a medicine standpoint this paper is pretty far from being applicable to patients, and may never be, although that is par for the course for a lot of medical research. I'm not smart enough to comment on the ML details.
Imagine if your toilet said, "uh hey so your X levels seem unusual. This might be nothing but you should seek a doctor"
Doctors currently manually screen for many cancers, over entire demographics. It takes up an extraordinary amount of time, takes decades of training, and still misses cancer.
A breathalyser or toilet can sample you twice a day. That can feed into a risk analysis that pushes you onto blood screening (again, largely automated chem detection, only nursing support required). If you're still setting off alarms at that point, you go to the specialist.
And that's the point. Whereas they'd have been seeing 100% of their demographic, these machines are doing layers of screening for them. They end up only seeing a tiny fraction, where their job shifts to final confirmation and treatment.
What is really important is these machines cannot miss things. A low false positive rate is acceptable. False negatives over zero cannot be allowed because they'll delay or prevent further testing.
The long term, personalised health view behind this is what's interesting to me.
Medicine has a lot of wide-windows of what's normal for "people", but often the first signs of an underlying issue is that something that was normal for you at one end of a window begins to move, or change, in ways it hasn't before.
One sample of a blood test might tell you "that level is a little lower than average, but still not low enough we'd worry". But the historical knowledge that "I've actually always tended to be on the higher side of average for that measurement" changes the picture drastically.
Like you say, when it comes to looking at false positives of new tools like this, sure, a tool may be useless at giving you a one time 100% accurate reading, but if you can watch the trend of it over time that may be valuable.
It might even be a good thing. With enough regular feedback, we might emotionally adjust to the realization that "maybe you should get checked out" is not OMG I'm going to die.
b) "Get checked" may itself cause problems, for example: Scans for breast cancer involve radiation which may actually cause cancer. Biopsies can also be quite invasive. Obviously the risk is low, but depending on the exact numbers and it might actually be better to not get screened until one is in a known high-risk group (where the base rate fallacy doesn't skew the results so much).
> It seems a priory quite plausbile that there's a significant genetic component to this.
a priori
There's a very popular trend to imagine genetic components in every human behavior. It's not just incorrect, it's very dangerous.
> Scans for breast cancer involve radiation which may actually cause cancer.
That's easily handled using common practices. If breath and* blood test are positive do CT scan.
(On a lighter note I just can't help but think of a few scenes from a particular movie when we approach new automation fields... "This one goes in your mouth, this one goes in your ear, this one goes in your butt. No wait...")
But I second your motion to anybody who hasn't seen it.
I think that's exactly right, which is what makes it particularly amusing to look back at Hubert Dreyfuses' apocalyptic declarations that computers can't do things that resemble human-like judgment. One of those things was supposedly chess, which required "insight", which computers can't have. But once computers got better at it than humans, everyone kind of forgot about it and pointed at new examples.
You can build someone a 10 bedroom mansion and then offer to give them a 20 bedroom mansion instead, and they might say, "Thanks, but 10 bedrooms is quite enough." But people generally won't say no if you can offer them a longer lifespan and/or an increase in quality of life.
Incidentally, if retirement age is fixed, increases in longevity lead to a higher proportion of society that is only consuming but not producing. Unless you want a decrease in standard of living, you have to compensate somehow, be it increases in efficiency, rapid population growth, or raising the retirement age. If you raise the retirement age, then medicine needs to help make sure most people are not only alive but can also actually be fit to work at age 70-80.
You do not live longer if you become older in a biological sense.
Also, it is very important to note: they are comparing a CNN analysing a GC-MS[1] sample to a human expert analysing a GC-MS sample, which is basically a 1D plot of intensities of chemicals. This is not a comparison to a human smelling someone's breath.
Also, as far as I can see, they never compare to a GC-MS run with selective ion monitoring (SIM), which would be a lot faster for the human to analyse.
[0] (ResearchGate link, sorry): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324921031_Convoluti...
[1] A gas-chromatograph mass spectrometer is a device which samples a gas and detects what chemical species are present. It's what they do at airports when they swipe that piece of fabric on your luggage and put it in a machine (GC-MS) to look for explosives. It's a nice tool, used extensively in labs worldwide, but expensive (usually a couple hundred thousand USD, depending on specifications).
That being said, those data numbers seem extremely small. In reading the paper, I see that they attempted to augment it a bit. But it still seems near meaningless given the tiny sample set.
There was an interesting story of a doctor who noticed cancer while watching TV and passed the word on. https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Wellness/woman-appeared-hgtv-find...
Also, if someone had a golf-ball sized growth on the outside of their body, I'm sure the person is already aware of it. (The body scanners can't see inside the body.)
It's not hugely frequent, I don't think, but it's not unheard of for this kind of thing to happen.
Most of the family are in the industry, and just watching TV or whatever you'll occasionally hear a comment about noticing a tremor or slight droop in someone's face that could be indicative of whatever.
The AI is impressive, but I'm equally impressed that a human can sniff someone's breath for a few hours and diagnose cancer. Amazing.
They make it sound as if the human expert was also sniffing peoples breath, trying to smell cancer
Having had a family member who was epileptic, I can attest he often had a unique odor on his breath shortly before a seizure occurred. Now, there are people doing research into training dogs to detect that and alert that a seizure is imminent.
This 2016 study[1] build a device which could detect 17 diseases via breath, and I think that was a manually built algorithm.
It's well known that dogs can smell cancer too (there's a 2006 study but I can't find it now).
The orginal paper is here http://andrea.soltoggio.net/data/papers/skaryszEtAl-CNN-GC-M...
at the moment they are essentially saying it's a promising tech that helps experts and cuts down on their errors. It helps with one part of the analysis. Looks like it is a long way from anything general use, though it's on the path towards that.
Then they would smell it in the wild and be struck with a sudden an anxiety about whether or not they should tell the person to get checked, given the odd nature of the clue.
So you can comfortably make this sneer about every new medical innovation you hear about, losing nothing for being wrong but crediting yourself with intuitive powers if you're right, which you likely will be some day, the more so the more you repeat the move.
That said, for every scandal like Theranos, the likelihood of another one just like it diminishes (if regulators and investors are acting effectively and rationally), so it might be a while before your prediction comes up.
Let's hope so!
For those who can't believe it, smells have a pH, humidity, heat capacity, temperature, density, and pressure to them. So if you can train your skin to be sensitive and concentrate on those things you can feel smells.
It was not long till I realized that people give off a certain odor. And those odors are often related to the germs on their body. And the food they ate. Sometimes I could even tell if the person was sick.
I never developed a method of detecting illnesses simply by waving my hand on the person unless I was acutely familiar with the sickness, but if we can develop machines to detect "smell" (a fact I did not know) then we can definitely detect machines to scan people as they walk through a door and tell what germs they carry.
Of course my dream powers are to tell what antigerm ointment each person should use.