Artificial nose to sniff out tell-tale signs of illness

AN ARTIFICIAL nose that can tell whether someone is ill from the smell of their breath is being developed by Scottish scientists.

The smell of a patient was used in medical diagnosis a century ago, but is now being rediscovered as a useful tool for doctors.

The "Spectral Nose", which is being built at Strathclyde University, would use advanced chemistry to detect different odours, and then a computer screen would give the patient an all-clear or indicate which disease they could have.

A desktop device for hospitals, laboratories, doctors’ surgeries and the workplace is being developed, along with a hand-held version which could be used in the home or in the field.

The device could also be used for quality control in the food, drinks and perfume industries and eventually become an effective way for the police to test suspected drug drivers at the roadside.

Professor Andrew Mills, of Strathclyde’s chemistry department, said they were still in the developmental stage and while a working device was some way off, progress had been goodto date.

"The idea of detecting odours and using that as a means of medical diagnosis is not new. But although it is 100 years old, it is being rediscovered," he said.

"Where diseases are associated with characteristic odours, this could be used for rapid screening and mass screening.

"Smallpox, liver failure, diabetes - there are a lot of things you can pick up just from the smell of a patient’s breath," he said. "Even measles has a characteristic smell.

"What we’re aiming to do is produce a bench-top machine that will be used in the lab and in hospitals, but also a hand-held version that may not have as high a quality but will identify any obvious smells of concern and not be subjective - it should be correct whether it’s winter or summer and whether anybody has a cold.

"It will have been calibrated and trained to say, ‘These are the characteristic odours associated with these diseases’."

Prof Mills, who is working on the project with Dr Paul Slavin, said the nose would be made up of a series of elements in an array. Depending on the odour detected, these would change colour or fluorescent intensity, allowing a computer to detect what kind of substances were being given off by the body.

Prof Mills said the hand-held device, when used in the home, might simply suggest a trip to the doctor if it detected a smell associated with a disease.

"The display would say ‘normal or fine’, or something for concern. It would hopefully then identify what diseases it could be associated with, but it mustn’t panic people," he said.

"It would perhaps go ‘maybe you should go and see somebody’ [a doctor]. But in a hospital it should provide a full diagnostic output and say, ‘I haven’t seen these vapours except from patients with this disease or that disease."

The hand-held device is expected to cost several hundred pounds initially, while the desktop lab version would cost several thousand.

But Prof Mills added that the price could become more affordable if the device became a popular success.

Amanda Vezey, a care adviser at Diabetes UK said: "This is certainly an interesting concept, but it’s obviously in the very early stages of development. If a system was refined enough to diagnose diabetes it could potentially help with earlier identification."

Colin Bell, a wine taster for Harvey Nichols in Edinburgh, said: "It sounds interesting, but I don’t think there will be anything that can replace the human nose."

ODOUR AND DIAGNOSE-IS

SMELL, from the breath or skin, and the disease it suggests:

Rotten apples, pear drops or acetone (used in varnish remover) - forms of diabetes.

Sweaty sheep - smallpox.

Plucked feathers - measles.

A butcher’s shop - yellow fever.

Fish - uremia, which stems from kidney failure and can cause coma.

Musty fish/raw liver - liver failure.

Foul smell - a lung abscess or intestinal obstruction.

Freshly baked brown bread - typhoid.

Stale beer - tuberculosis.