You and I smell chocolate cake, but a dog smells flour, sugar, eggs etc. Because of this amazing ability to smell, studies are showing dogs can detect cancer earlier and more accurately than any machine in existence. Medical scent detection dogs will transform medicine through early detection of cancer. It takes anywhere between 6 to 8 months and over 300 samples to train and certify a cancer dete
ction dog. All of the dogs are trained on cancer samples, healthy control samples, and disease control samples. They also must be friendly and social, since they will work with people. Dogs do not sniff an actual person, they sniff samples such as breath, plasma, urine and sputum (saliva). They are presented with a known cancer sample for training, and are rewarded for being able to determine the cancer sample from the healthy samples. Over time, the odor of “cancer” is generalized, which is of extreme importance when training a medical scent detection dog. A very large number of samples are used, and we never re-use a sample for training or testing our dogs accuracy levels. All accuracy levels were attained by doing “double-blinded” trials, where brand new samples are numbered, and the dog is able to find all of the new, different cancer samples among brand new healthy controls and disease controls. This way, we can be sure the dog has “generalized” the “cancer odor”, and is not merely memorizing samples.
