It’s 2050 and you’re due for your monthly physical exam. Times have changed, so you no longer have to endure an orifices check, a needle in your vein, and a week of waiting for your blood test results. Instead, the nurse welcomes you with, “The doctor will sniff you now,” and takes you into an airtight chamber wired up to a massive computer. As you rest, the volatile molecules you exhale or emit from your body and skin slowly drift into the complex artificial intelligence apparatus, colloquially known as Deep Nose. Behind the scene, Deep Nose’s massive electronic brain starts crunching through the molecules, comparing them to its enormous olfactory database. Once it’s got a noseful, the AI matches your odors to the medical conditions that cause them and generates a printout of your health. Your human doctor goes over the results with you and plans your treatment or adjusts your meds.
That’s how Alexei Koulakov, a researcher at
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who studies how the human olfactory system works, envisions one possible future of our healthcare. A physicist turned neuroscientist, Koulakov is working to understand how humans perceive odors and to classify millions of volatile molecules by their “smellable” properties. He plans to catalogue the existing smells into a comprehensive artificial intelligence network. Once built, Deep Nose will be able to identify the odors of a person or any other olfactory bouquet of interest—for medical or other reasons. “It will be a chip that can diagnose or identify you,” Koulakov says. Scent uniquely identifies a person or merchandise, so Deep Nose can also help at the border patrol, sniffing travelers, cargo, or explosives. “Instead of presenting passports at the airport, you would just present yourself.” And doctor’s visits would become a breeze—literally.
What can one’s odor tell about one’s health? Apparently, a lot. “The information that can be picked up from the airborne molecules is amazingly rich,” says Dmitry Rinberg, also a former physicist and now a neurobiologist at New York University who collaborates with Koulakov on olfactory research. “It’s so informative that you can tell what kind of beer people drank at a bar last night.” Odor can reveal other things happening with the body, he adds. “So we are trying to use this information for odor-based diagnostic approaches.”
Recent research finds that many diseases, including cancer, tuberculosis, and Parkinson’s, can manifest themselves through volatile compounds that change the person’s scent. Our bodies release certain metabolites—products of our metabolic activities. Some of these molecules are volatiles and become part of our scent, or “odorprint.” When we become sick or start developing a disease, our metabolic processes start functioning differently, emitting different volatile molecules or mixtures of them, so our odorprint changes too. “These molecules carry information about our state of health,” Koulakov says. For example, patients with Parkinson disease produce an unusually high amount of sebum,1 a waxy lipid-rich biofluid excreted by the sebaceous glands of the skin, which sensitive noses can detect. Deep Nose could grab this information from the thin air. That could allow physicians to detect disease sooner, easier, and perhaps avoid some invasive diagnostic procedures. “It would essentially revolutionize the diagnostics system,” Koulakov says.
by Lina Zeldovich, Nautilus |
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Image: Dr. Hiro Nalkayama, Rinberg Lab, NYU Neuroscience Institute
