The patient breathes to a mask similar to an oxygen mask for 5 minutes and this is how the Champalimaud Foundation, which has been investigating cancer diseases for several years, detects the disease as soon as possible.
Innovation, which works for now only to detect lung cancers, ovary and pancreas – Three of the most aggressive and deadly cancers, because they have a difficult diagnosis – has already diagnosed 300 patients. About 400 people are part of a study sample control group.
“Compared to other exams, this is really simplewe just have to be patience to be that little stopped, ”says a target patient of the study.
Pedro Duarte Vazresearcher at the Champalimaud Foundation lung unit, explains the process.
“We look at an exhaust air pattern of people who have no disease versus those who have. They all have their differences. We have to resort to artificial intelligence methods that allow us to classify some image databases of these data that represent the chemical composition of each person’s respiratory profile and add them to the same databases to be able to classify them,” the researcher says.
“We don’t want to be a diagnostic test, because there is no ability to make diagnosis with this test, at least for now,” explains Pedro Duarte Vaz. THE Focus is “screening and early detection”.
Researchers later expect to implement the new system in health centers, where it would become part of the diagnostic routine. But they recognize that it is still early for it.
“Let’s confront our models with a more instituted test, in this case a thoracic tomography. Passing this validation we can open to a more general population and, if all goes well, we can start doing this as a common technique,” explains the expert.
More than 5,000 people die a year of lung cancer, trachea and bronchi. Ovary cancer kills half a thousand women annually, and more than two thousand people die victims of pancreas cancer, according to data from the Portuguese League against cancer.
