7 ms·
Deep Nose may one day be the best diagnostician in medicine
- haspoken 6y agohttp://archive.is/l4As3 http://archive.is/l4As3
- unnouinceput 6y agoAhh, I bet this tech will be first used to add one more layer for Big Brother surveillance, and maybe if there is something else to be squeezed from it will be used for medical purposes as the article envision. Hold on to your horses because it's gonna get worse first without knowing if will ever be better after.
- dnate 6y agoyou underestimate the need of rich people for health care. It will be first used to cure the rich.
- ogig 6y agoElectronic noses are a recurrent thought of mine. Aplications would be countless. Now, the prospect of using mice noses and then scan their brains as a shortcut feels wrong, like, animal slavery wrong. I know, these are lab mices, and we are eating millions of animals everyday, and so on, still, can't avoid the feeling. Imagine the device; air flows to a chamber filled with electrode implanted mice, the software analizes the signal and prints, in paper, a results reports. Rick & Morty league.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 6y agoCombine an electronic nose with Boston Dynamics hound and you have a pretty good recipe for a nightmare or a horror movie. During the day it recharges... during the night it hunts... and it never stops chasing you.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- didgeoridoo 6y ago“Black Mirror Did It!” is the new “Simpsons Did It!”
- carapace 6y agoBoston Dynamics Bloodhound :(
- Dumblydorr 6y agoThere was a cat named Oscar in the Steere House nursing home in Providence, RI, who was kind of a jerk. However, he had one incredible power. The advanced dementia ward where he lived had numerous sick patients. Sometimes, He would jump onto one of their beds. Sure enough, hours later, that patient would die. He had a remarkable record, over 20 cases in a row were predicted correctly. It must've been smell, he sensed the deterioration from biochemical signals. Why he liked to be around death, I don't know, cats are strange!
- TaupeRanger 6y agoSounds apocryphal or just flat wrong. A cat that jumps up on a bunch of beds in such a place is bound to do so on the beds of dying patients. The dying ones probably got more visits from doctors, family, etc. and the cat could've been responding to the presence of humans, or any number of other factors. To assume it was smelling imminent death and jumping on the bed to signal it is way beyond what you could possibly prove.
- WhompingWindows 6y agoIt's not flat wrong nor apocryphal, check your facts, his performance was studied and published in a book and in the New England Journal -- do you think the NEJM is likely to publish pure aprocryphal falsehood? I volunteered in the Steere House and met the cat, and my close family member was a higher-up in the org and personally witnessed the cat's abilities numerous times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_(therapy_cat) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_(therapy_cat) https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp078108 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp078108
- jacquesm 6y agoIt may be true. But also: it may be coincidence, there is a chance that the cat naps on the beds of people that are lying quietly, which is something that probably precedes death more often than it does not, the cat may sleep on other beds but nobody thinks much of it and so on. What the NEJM publishes is not always accurate or even true, there have been numerous examples of retracted studies so no need for the appeal to authority. If it is true then someone should figure out the mechanism and prove it otherwise it might just as well be coincidence.
- phenkdo 6y agoTechnically, this doesn't seem to be a nose per se, but more creating a sensor to detect molecules for which the mammalian nose has evolved to detect. If we have an excitatory pattern, then most AI techniques should be able to detect it easily. Instead of creating a single modality i.e. artificial noses or ears, medicine would benefit from a multimodal sensory system that uses vision, smell, auditory and perhaps even taste, _in conjunction_, as the human body is rich with signals through all these modalities.
- benkoller 6y ago> Instead of creating a single modality i.e. artificial noses or ears, medicine would benefit from a multimodal sensory system that uses vision, smell, auditory and perhaps even taste, _in conjunction_, as the human body is rich with signals through all these modalities. Thats a great thought right there. Adding an over-time perspective would make this even more powerful, as a lot of information is encapsulated in change, not just absolute observation. I wonder how much of the required sensing tech is already available, but most likely not rated for medical usage yet.
- aaron695 6y ago> _in conjunction_ Given the decades of research into an electronic sense of smell and the billions of $ it will be worth if we can get a electronic nose, why are we jumping the gun to the other things? > a sensor to detect molecules for which the mammalian nose has evolved to detect. This would be a modern marvel and so far impossible. It also wouldn't have to be mammalian, there's no reason to limit it. > If we have an excitatory pattern, then most AI techniques should be able to detect it easily. Exactly. I'm not sure why you'd need AI at all. It should just be a look up table. An electronic nose is a big deal. We are talking the ability to know what people or vehicles are carrying without a search, tracking people and animals over land, the ability to find every truffle in a field, it should help us create smells like 4D cinema, find pollution in water and air and land, track leaks, cooking, find animal and mineral resources, animal husbandry and medicine.
- durovo 6y agoHow about using an animal's nose instead of an electronic nose? Detect the brain signals and let the "AI" figure out the patterns when the animal inhales something. No need to create a new nose from scratch, no need to train the animal as well.
- TaupeRanger 6y agoUnfortunately, diagnosis is almost never the actual problem in any of these diseases... it's what to do when you discover it. Not to mention the problem of over-diagnosis and iatrogenic harms that happens when we know that you might have something but not where or to what extent you have it, requiring more tests and stress.
- sfink 6y agoThe treatment of some of these diseases (especially cancer) depends heavily on when you discover it. If this were built into every cell phone, nobody would make it past stage 1 cancer. ...well, almost nobody. "You're gonna die because you didn't call your mother often enough."
- TaupeRanger 6y agoTreatment != Outcome. Until an RCT is completed, we won't actually know if such diagnostic devices are a net good or harm. You are ignoring the very real effects of iatrogenic harms and the psychological harms of giving people alerts that "cancer is detected!!!" when in actuality they would've been fine and never noticed any symptoms whatsoever. Not to mention the associated medical costs, tests done, time wasted, etc. This is why mammograms are so controversial: they might save you from dying of cancer, but they don't actually reduce your overall mortality. Screening doesn't always save lives by default. It's complicated. https://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.h6080 https://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.h6080
- dontreact 6y agoI honestly think the aversion to screening has more to do with other political and economic factors. For example, lung cancer screening has been shown to clearly reduce all-cause mortality in an extremely comprehensive study with 7 years of followup (NLST). These results are also replicated in studies around the world. The problem is, how do you properly incentivize patients, providers and payers to actually implement this? The payoffs are not immediate but are rather long term for everyone involved: it takes 6+ years to clearly see the significant mortality reduction payoff actually show up in the data. The downsides, on the other hand, are immediate (another trip to the hospital/imaging center, deaths due to false positives, increased costs, more work for clinicians).
- appleflaxen 6y agoHow is a digital nose different than a mass spec applied to sweat/blood/saliva?
- sfink 6y agoThat seems like trying to figure out the plot of a book given a histogram of its letter frequencies. A mass spectrometer is not going to be able to distinguish a rich mixture of compounds. Nor can it distinguish molecules with the same elements. But it's been done, and apparently might still be in limited use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_spectrometry#Respired_gas_monitor_spectrometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_spectrometry#Respired_gas...
- petra 6y agoHow does the process for distinguishing a rich mixture of compounds looks like ? How complex/automatable is it ?
- sfink 6y agoFrom the article, it sounds like doing it in a way that approaches the sense of smell is quite hard, and no adequate approach has yet been figured out.
- Metacelsus 6y ago>A mass spectrometer is not going to be able to distinguish a rich mixture of compounds. Nor can it distinguish molecules with the same elements. That's why GC-MS/MS is a thing
- ryzvonusef 6y agoas an anosmic by birth, please give me a device that lets me know the food i'm taking is bad, have had a few close encounters with food poisoning
- rtx 6y agoNever thought about this side effect. What precautions do you take.
- cgravill 6y agoThere are some companies such as https://www.owlstonemedical.com/ https://www.owlstonemedical.com/ who’ve made some progress on medical diagnosis from breath
- dontreact 6y agoTech is interesting, title is clickbait. There are many important conditions which will leave no trace outside the body. This is why long term I’m excited about ultrasound getting cheaper, allowing individuals to look inside themselves more frequently. As a novel signal or biomarker, figuring out aromatic traces of diseases we didn’t even know about seems cool too. So in that sense this is interesting. But no, diagnosing disease is obviously multimodal. And I’m not at all convinced this would even be the most important modality, even in the distant future.
- CodeGlitch 6y agoI'm excited about the prospect of more consumer level medical diagnosis systems. As you say cheaper ultrasound at home would be awesome, and the results could be sent to a trained physician/ai to tell you if the dark mass is supposed to be there. Putting people's health into their own hands is a positive IMHO.
- sfink 6y agoIt's interesting to think of this from a security point of view. What data can be exfiltrated? How much signal are we giving off all the time that would leak information on way more of what's going on inside than we realize? If Spectre can use a timing side channel to peer into regions of memory that were not supposed to be accessed, how many more side channels are there in a human body that mostly wasn't designed to conceal anything? (That's not exactly true, we've evolved to hide quietly, many things hunt by smell, women conceal their state of fertility, etc. But technology can access a much lower threshold of signal than anything evolution has had to worry about.) If you listen closely enough, I'd expect we're all open books. Time the exact duration that nerve impulses travel, that blood coagulates, that sweat is produced, that hormones are released, etc. Look at the ratios of chemicals produced by digestion, respiration, locomotion, etc. Technologists are already mining some of this wealth of signal from just filtered speech recordings. There's so much more that could be harnessed (and abused).
- oa335 6y agoOn the podcast Invisibilia I heard a fascinating story about a woman who could smell people who would develop Parkinson’s, well before other diagnostic tests. Here’s an article about her: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/23/820274501/her-incredible-sense-of-smell-is-helping-scientists-find-new-ways-to-diagnose-di https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/23/8202745...
- isoprophlex 6y agoWith all the "deep x" going around, i for one can't wait for the development of some otolaryngology killer ai tech named "deep throat"
- the-dude 6y agoDeep
- favoritecolor 6y agoLove seeing these types of posts on HN! Every now and then I see a post about olfaction, and since I am in the olfactory receptor research space, I just want to put my two cents out there. Digital chemical sensing is hard, and yet biological chemical sensing is amazing. Understandably, there's always been immense interest in digitizing the biological process of smell. People have been pitching various technologies, from the early days of the WaspHound[0] and DARPA's largely failed RealNose project[1], to current efforts from startups[2] and big players in perfumery[3]. It is my opinion that all of these technologies are solving the wrong problem. Olfactory receptors are just plain horrible proteins. They're extremely difficult to produce, and even when you can express them, they have exactly the wrong type of properties. Each olfactory receptor responds to many different chemicals with really bad sensitivity. While that works really well for animals, these properties are a nightmare for digitization. If we want to digitize chemical sensing, I believe we will need better proteins than naturally occurring olfactory receptors. And that's what I am trying to do currently in my Ph.D. research! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenoptera_training https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenoptera_training [1] https://www.defensedaily.com/darpa-awards-contracts-for-sensor-based-on-canine-smell-sense/homeland-security/ https://www.defensedaily.com/darpa-awards-contracts-for-sens... [2] https://yesse.tech/ https://yesse.tech/ [3] https://www.firmenich.com/company/research https://www.firmenich.com/company/research
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- tgbugs 6y agoIf you haven't read "What the fly’s nose tells the fly’s brain" [0] take a look. It helps explain why the olfactory sensors might actually be selected to have wide spectrum sensitivity (it's a feature not a bug). 0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4522789/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4522789/
- favoritecolor 6y agoThanks for the link! Cool to think about how the evolution of smell has optimized for "a maximum entropy code." I totally agree, it's a feature not a bug. A wide spectrum is absolutely an essential feature for an animal to sense thousands (to millions) of different chemicals without thousands (to millions) of different receptors. So, calling olfactory receptors "just plain horrible proteins" was a bit rude to them, haha! However, in my opinion, digital sensors based on olfactory receptors have and will continue to suffer from such wide spectra and poor sensitivities.
- trhway 6y agodogs smelling covid https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03149-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03149-9 : "Riad Sarkis, a surgeon and researcher at Saint Joseph University in Beirut, is part of a French–Lebanese project that has trained 18 dogs. Sarkis used the best two performers for the airport trial in Lebanon. The dogs screened 1,680 passengers and found 158 COVID-19 cases that were confirmed by PCR tests. The animals correctly identified negative results with 100% accuracy, and correctly detected 92% of positive cases, according to unpublished results." btw, 10% of passengers are covid positive, and i'd guess most are asymptomatic as most of them wouldn't be flying otherwise.