Doctors have long known that trained dogs can sniff out prostate cancer from urine, but scientists are now teaching machines to do the same. 

At RealNose, co-founded by physicist Andreas Mershin, researchers trained AI to read the chemical “scent signatures” of urine samples. By treating the data like images, achieving about 75% accuracy, an encouraging step toward non-invasive diagnosis, though trained dogs still outperform the machines for now.

Published in PLOS ONE, 2025 — Rotteveel et al. Towards robust medical machine olfaction.