What Does a Dog’s Nose Know? A.I. May Soon Tell Us

It’s well known that dogs have superpowers when it comes to smell. A dog can easily sniff out the equivalent of a teaspoon of sugar dissolved in two Olympic swimming pools—about one part in 1 billion. In fact, some dogs are known to be able to detect odors at concentrations as small as one part per trillion. This is a sensitivity hundreds of thousands of times greater than humans. It is the reason that dogs have been trained to detect everything from drugs to cancer.

But this training is difficult, time-consuming and expensive, and each animal can usually only be trained to find one set of target scents. Meanwhile, our best electronic means of detecting volatile organic compounds in the air—or on surfaces—are Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry (GC/MS) machines that can cost more than $100,000 and take at least 20 minutes to analyze a sample.

Now, a UF Accelerate startup called Canaery, thinks it can read the neurons firing in a dog’s olfactory bulb in real-time and, with the help of machine learning, turn the animal into a detection device able to suss out a vast range of molecules, all without the animal having to be specially trained. “This does for scent what machine vision did for sight,” says Gabriel Lavella, Canaery’s founder and chief executive officer.

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