Dogs team up with AI to sniff out cancer

The dogs’ names are Mars, Moon and Pluto, and you might say their cancer-sniffing skills are out of this world.

An experimental screening method that paired the dogs with artificial intelligence was able to detect the odor of cancer carried on patients’ breaths. The canine-AI duo was both highly accurate and highly sensitive, successfully spotting four types of cancer in 94 percent of cases, scientists report November 15 in Scientific Reports.

What’s more, the screening worked just as well detecting early stage cancers as it did later stage cancers, says Assaf Rabinowicz, chief technology officer at SpotitEarly, the company that developed the method. That’s crucial because early detection can substantially contribute to increasing cancer survival rates, he says.

The new screening method taps dogs’ “amazing olfactory capabilities,” Rabinowicz says. Canines and other animals can act like disease detectives, sniffing out the faint scents that serve as cancer’s odor signature (SN: 6/25/24).

For this study, Rabinowicz’s team trained Labrador retrievers to smell breath samples and sit if they sniffed breast, lung, colorectal or prostate cancer. Figuring out whether the dogs are indicating yes or no sounds simple, but consistently reading their body language can be tricky for humans. That’s where AI comes in. The researchers trained an AI model that relies on machine learning and computer vision to interpret the dogs’ cues.

The team partnered with medical centers in Israel to test their system on breath samples from nearly 1,400 participants, 261 of whom had tested positive for one of the four cancer types the dogs trained on. With the help of AI, the doggy detectors picked out 245 of these cases. And they rarely called a negative sample “positive” — just 60 out of 1,048 cases.

SpotitEarly is planning a larger clinical trial in the United States and is aiming to report early results in 2026. The company is now working with beagles for the cancer-detecting work, partly because they’re smaller and easier to train. But Mars, Moon, Pluto and the other Labradors who worked in the study are still top dogs to the researchers, and continue to contribute to research and development, Rabinowicz says.

The Labs are very beautiful and very friendly, he says, and “they did a very good job.”