Portable Lung Cancer Detector

More people die from lung cancer than any other form of cancer. It's a fact. Not everyone can afford CT scans and other diagnostic methods to check for the disease. That's a fact.
Research shows that your breath, alone, can tell you if you have lung cancer. Apparently this has been a know fact for sometime now. The breath of those with this disease has higher concentrations of alkanes and other volatile organic compounds, according to the Times.
Members of the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have recently developed what is to be known as a fairly inexpensive, portable sensor technology that can differentiate a healthy person from a lung cancer patient.
The sensor consists of tiny(5 billionths of a meter in diameter) particles of gold, which are capped with organic compounds chosen specifically to react with the deadly compounds found in the breath of people with the disease.
Here's how it works: When the volatile particles are deposited between two electrodes, they act as an electrical resistor. Researchers found that when combined, an array of nine resistors creates patterns of change in the array, depending on whether or not the person has cancer. In plain English, this means that by breathing into a small tube, filled with little sensors testing for changes involved with highly volatile particles, such as alkanes. These changes will either tell you if you have cancer, or hopefully that you're a healthy non-smoker.
This is a great achievement, that could possibly save hundreds or maybe even thousands who cannot afford health care. The researchers are still developing the system, and in the near future, they hope a similar approach could diagnose a range of diseases.