Old dogs teaching us new tricks in the detection of prostate cancer

Research into medical detection dogs aims to improve diagnostic approaches for prostate cancer.   Specially trained medical detection dogs have been used in the detection of cancers for several years. Now, new research suggests that an artificial neural network could learn from the dogs’ ability to recognize aggressive prostate cancer. The research team from Medical Detection Dogs (Milton Keynes, UK) led by Claire Guest, have published their findings in PLOS ONE.   These dogs can be used to detect aggressive prostate cancer from urine samples with a high level of accuracy compared to other testing methods, such as the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening test, which can miss aggressive forms of the disease or give a false indication of the aggressiveness...