Many years ago, I remember reading an article about a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium (Prof. Y. Ghoos if I’m not mistaking), specialized in the intestinal system, who developed a technique to diagnose many digestive and other intestine-related problems by sniffing out people’s breath.

It appears that now sniffing bad breath can lead to diagnoses far beyond bad digestion, e.g. lung cancer. With a device about the size of a coin, Dr. Peter Mazzone and colleagues at the Cleveland Clinic are able to detect lung-cancer – even in early stages – via the ‘gas fingerprint’ of people’s breath.

Increasingly miniaturization is enabling medicine not only to penetrate the body in less destructive, ever easier ways to ‘get to the bottom of things’ and extend doctors’ senses and diagnostic tools, but it also facilitates diagnosis outside of the body. The future for personal diagnostic tools looks bright.

Via FuturePundit

Related posts:

1. cancer update
2. intra-body communication
3. off the shelf cancer drug

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 19:36 and is filed under technology, trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.