Introduction
Medical science has come a long way in the last century and half, from being predominantly based on the subjective skills that were guided by the intuitive capacity of the physician, called ‘clinical acumen’ in common parlance, to a greater reliance on the ever expanding repertoire of diagnostic tools which add an objective component to the process of identifying health problems and handling them. This had lead to the myriad use of these diagnostic techniques, which have time and again been proven to be of utmost value in specific case diagnosis, their efficacy ratified by epidemiological research.
So now the physician is encouraged to call upon the services of the wide array of investigation tools in order that his/her case identification is as precise as possible with current available techniques. Though this augurs well for the science of identification of health problems, it has lead to a lot of infrastructural problems. It becomes ethically imperative that when the knowhow is available then it be made universally available and accessible to the public in a democratic way of functioning. This places a lot of pressure on the
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Horvath G et al in 2008 reported a study where they taught a dog to distinguish different histopathological types and grades of ovarian carcinomas, including borderline tumors, from healthy control samples. Double-blind tests showed 100% sensitivity and 97.5% specificity. Moreover, the odor of ovarian carcinomas seems to differ from those of other gynecological malignances such cervical, endometrial, and vulvar carcinomas.6
Overall sensitivity of canine scent detection compared to biopsy confirmed conventional diagnosis was 0.99. 95% (CI) overall specificity 99%.
Ordinary household dogs with only basic, behavioral puppy training were trained to accurately distinguish breath samples of lung and breast cancer patients from those of