I read the paper, they had 11 patients with known cancer and trained the NN to detect volatile organic compounds in the breath from raw GC-MS (gas chromatograph

I read the paper, they had 11 patients with known cancer and trained the NN to detect volatile organic compounds in the breath from raw GC-MS (gas chromatography mass spectrometry) data. From what I understand, the interesting and novel application is in the NN learning to parse the data for the detection of the aldehydes they were interested in. Nothing about this paper involves testing in patients where you aren't sure if they have cancer or not from what I read. Lots of false positives as well. Furthermore, whether or not this type of breath testing is useful in diagnosis is an open research question. 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.