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Optical 'Dog's Nose' for Fast, Onsite Breath Analysis for Disease

University of Adelaide researchers are developing a laser system for fast, non-invasive, onsite breath analysis for disease, potentially enabling screening for a range of diseases including diabetes, infections, and various cancers in the future. The researchers have developed an instrument they equate to an 'optical dog's nose' which uses a special laser to measure the molecular content of a sample of gas. The system uses a specialized laser – an optical frequency comb - that sends up to a million different light frequencies through the sample in parallel. Each molecule absorbs light at different optical frequencies and therefore has a unique molecular fingerprint.

Topics:
Diagnostics Lasers & Laser Systems Medical Optics Photonics

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    Transcript

    00:00:03 I am doctor James Anstie. I'm a theme leader at the Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing at the University of Adelaide and this is my experiment I guess what we're trying to do here with this setup is to be to build an optical dog's nose you know every so often in the media you see stories that you know dogs can can detect whether there's something going wrong in your body by how your breath smells We think that dogs a great but they're not as easy to tame is light and so what we want to do is use light in place if the dogs nose, to detect the molecules that are in your breath and also to to figure out what's going on inside we're taking essentially white light and we are sending it through a sample

    00:00:46 molecules and we're watching how those molecules absorb that light We expect in the next few months to approach pop per million sensitivity and just put that in perspective puts us somewhere between a human and a dog in terms of sensitivity One of the nice things about it is that we can detect molecules that dogs can't and we can also detect with very precise quantification what's there. The big difference is that we know what's going on and we know how to communicate it which is very difficult with the dog