Canine scent detection for the diagnosis of lung cancer in a screening-like situation
The prognosis in lung cancer depends largely on early stage detection, and thus new screening
methods are attracting increasing attention. Canine scent detection has shown promising results in
lung cancer detection, but there has only been one previous study that reproduces a screening-like
situation. Here breath samples were collected from 122 patients at risk for lung cancer (smokers and
ex-smokers); 29 of the subjects had confirmed diagnosis of lung cancer but had not yet been treated
and 93 subjects had no signs or symptoms of lung cancer at the time of inclusion. The breath samples
were presented to a trained sniffer dog squadron in a double-blind manner. A rigid scientific
protocol was used with respect to earlier canine scent detection studies, with one difference:
instead of offering one in five positive samples to the dogs, we offered a random number of positive
samples (zero to five). The final positive and negative predictive values of 30.9% and 84.0%,
respectively, w...
Source: Journal of Breath Research - Category: Respiratory Medicine Authors: Klaus Hackner, Peter Errhalt, Michael Rolf Mueller, Manulea Speiser, Beatrice A Marzluf, Andrea Schulheim, Peter Schenk, Johannes Bilek and Theodor Doll Source Type: research