Not only do they love us unconditionally, they can also save our lives. In a new research conducted by the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), a trained rescue dog Frankie had a staggering 90% accuracy rate at detecting cancer by simply smelling urine from people with thyroid cancer and urine from those without this terrible disease.
90% Accuracy
Namely, in an attempt to provide an alternative to current invasive tests, the scientists managed to train the German shepherd called Frankie to recognize the smell of cancerous human thyroid tissue.
Our canine hero had been trained to lie down when he smelled cancer, and to simply turn away when he didn’t smell thyroid cancer in a urine sample.
The researchers over at the UAMS thyroid clinic then gathered the samples from 34 patients who subsequently underwent biopsies and diagnostic surgery. 15 of them were confirmed to have thyroid cancer, while the other 19 had benign thyroid disease.
These results were, of course, kept secret from the researchers involved in the study, and then a gloved dog handler had Frankie sniff the urine samples. There were occasional breaks so Frankie would sniff a known cancerous sample in order to be rewarded and kept him motivated. In the end, Frankie managed to correctly identify 30 out of the 34 samples used.
This is just the Beginning
“Scent-trained canines could be used by physicians to detect the presence of thyroid cancer at an early stage and to avoid surgery when unwarranted,” said Donald Bodenner, a senior researcher at the UAMS thyroid clinic.
The researchers are now planning another study in association with Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine. This follow-up research will try and train two bomb-sniffing dogs for cancer detection.