Yahoo – AFP,
Mariëtte Le Roux, March 24, 2017
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| Assistant cynophilist Patrick Mairet, pictured in October 2016, and his dog Thor are part of the Kdog project, which aims to train dogs to detect breast cancer (AFP Photo/PASCAL LACHENAUD) |
Paris (AFP)
- Dogs can sniff out cancer from a piece of cloth which had touched the breast
of a woman with a tumour, researchers said Friday, announcing the results of an
unusual, but promising, diagnostic trial.
With just
six months of training, a pair of German Shepherds became 100-percent accurate
in their new role as breast cancer spotters, the team said.
The
technique is simple, non-invasive and cheap, and may revolutionise cancer
detection in countries where mammograms are hard to come by.
"In
these countries, there are oncologists, there are surgeons, but in rural areas
often there is limited access to diagnostics," Isabelle Fromantin, who
leads project Kdog, told journalists in Paris.
This means
that "people arrive too late," to receive life-saving treatment, she
added. "If this works, we can roll it out rapidly."
Working on
the assumption that breast cancer cells have a distinguishing smell which
sensitive dog noses will pick up, the team collected samples from 31 cancer
patients.
These were
pieces of bandage that patients had held against their affected breast.
With the
help of canine specialist Jacky Experton, the team trained German Shepherds
Thor and Nykios to recognise cancerous rags from non-cancerous ones.
"It is
all based on game-playing" and reward, he explained.
After six
months, the dogs were put to the test over several days in January and February
this year.
This time,
the researchers used 31 bandages from different cancer patients than those the
dogs had been trained on.
One bandage
was used per experiment, along with three samples from women with no cancer.
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In the
first round, the dogs detected 28 out of the 31 cancerous bandages and
on the
second try, they scored 100 percent (AFP Photo/PASCAL LACHENAUD)
|
Saving
lives
Each
bandage was placed in a box with a large cone which the dogs could stick their
noses into, sniffing at each in turn -- four boxes per test.
The
exercise was repeated once with each sample, meaning there were 62 individual
responses from the dogs in all.
In the
first round, the dogs detected 28 out of the 31 cancerous bandages -- a
90-percent pass rate, the researchers announced.
On the
second try, they scored 100 percent -- sitting down in front of the box
containing the cancerous sample with their muzzle pressed deep into the cone.
"There
is technology that works very well, but sometimes simpler things, more obvious
things, can also help," said Amaury Martin of the Curie Institute, citing
the many untested stories of dogs having detected cancer in their owners.
"Our
aim was see if we can move from conventional wisdom to... real science, with
all the clinical and research validation that this entails."
This was
the proof-of-concept phase of Kdog.
The next
step will be a clinical trial with more patients and another two dogs, but the
team is still in need of project funding.
The team
believes that one day dogs may be replaced by "sniffing" machines,
possibly armies of electronic diagnosticians dedicated to analysing samples
that people far from clinics would send them by the post.
In the
meantime, Experton said there is little danger of the trained dogs using their
new-found skills to accost cancer sufferers outside the lab.
"These
tests happen within a very specific work environment," he explained.
"In a different context, these dogs are unlikely to simply pounce on
random people in the street."
The team
says it is the only one to work with breast cancer detection from skin-touch
samples.
Other
research projects are testing canines' ability to smell different types of
cancer in samples of the skin itself, blood or urine, even the air people
exhale.
In France,
the chances of surviving ten years after a breast cancer diagnosis is about 85
percent, compared to around 50 percent in poorer countries.
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