By Aliyah Siddiqui
Correspondent
The Good News Lion is the Nation & World section’s bi-weekly news segment, highlighting positive news in the country and around the world. The theme of this article is human and animal collaborations.
Dogs trained to detect bowel cancer
The Medical Detection Dogs Charity recently started a study to teach seven dogs, including cocker spaniels, labradors and flat-coated retrievers, how to detect tumors. Although more research has to be done, the dogs have now shown signs that they can detect colorectal cancer from urine samples.
According to the New York Post, the process to train the dogs to detect diseases starts with researchers placing pots of urine on stands linked with computers that can track dogs’ sniffs. If a dog believes that the urine sample has cancer traces, the dogs signal the humans, such as through standing still, and are then rewarded for correct detections.
“If they identify a positive sample, which takes less than 10 seconds, they’ll get lots of treats, cuddles and affection,” said Gemma Butlin, the head of communications at the charity, to the New York Post.
Due to the sensitive nature of dogs' noses, the Medical Detection Dogs Charity has performed numerous studies with dogs being able to detect a variety of conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, malaria and the pseudomonas bacteria that can cause lung infections. The organization has also used dogs to detect prostate cancer with high specificity and sensitivity.
Andreas Mershin, founder and chief science officer of RealNose.AI, said that the work the Medical Detection Dogs Charity did, especially on prostate cancer, can be beneficial to developing new disease-detecting technology.
“Over the next two decades we continue to learn from the canine behavioral protocols developed at MDD how to create technologies that can detect and learn scents just like the dogs,” Mershin said. “The impact of MDD’s work is foundational and seminal to a whole new slew of emergent technologies.”
The charity is currently working on implementing double-blind testing to confirm the results in the coming months.
AI being used to understand animals
The Earth Species Project has started using artificial intelligence to try to understand the ways animals speak. The nonprofit laboratory, which has already done work to understand the vocalizations of different species including crows and beluga whales, hopes that AI will also allow humans to understand interspecies relationships.
According to the Associated Press, the project would not only allow humans to create “rudimentary dictionaries,” but also aid in conservation and protective efforts. For example, Jane Lawton, the organization’s director of impact, posited that understanding beluga whales’ calls could alert authorities when they were about to surface, potentially saving them from collisions with shipping vessels in Canada’s St. Lawrence River.
To train the AI language model, scientists at McGill University use technology to make specific calls during interactions with live zebra finches to help the researchers isolate distinct calls. The computer then processes these calls and responds with another call to generate a simulated conversation.
While it can be difficult to understand specific communication and calls, Logan James, a postdoctoral fellow working on the project, hopes that pitch or duration can solicit clues about the meaning of a finch’s call.
“So can we find a link between a form and function is sort of our way of maybe thinking about decoding,” James told AP News. “As she elongates her call, is that because she’s trying harder to elicit a response?”
While the model generated by AI may not always correctly interpret animal communication, the Earth Species Project hopes that their endeavors will enhance people’s appreciation of nature.
“We believe that by reminding people of the beauty, the sophistication, the intelligence that is resident in other species and in nature as a whole, we can start to, kind of, almost repair that relationship,” Lawton said.
