Thanks to their powerful noses, Labrador retrievers have been trained to sniff out and identify early stages of cancer. Through work with cancer cell samples, dogs can learn to smell the disease. The canine doctors can make a diagnosis by smelling a patient’s breath, blood, or stool. So far, the only known way to screen for easy stages of ovarian cancer is by letting a lab sniff the patient—they have very high success rates. Scientists believe the labs sniff out changes in volatile organic compounds that suggest cancer.
