[Is it possible to make a diagnosis of cancer by smelling?]

It had been reported that a house dog could make notify the dog's owner to have malignant melanoma through sniffing intently and trying to bite off a pigment lesion on the thigh of its owner. This fact resulted in extensive study of training dogs to distinguish the special odour of exhaled breath or urine of patients with cancer from those of the healthy subjects. These studies have promoted further development of detecting and identifying the special odour substances excreted from the patients with cancer using Gas chromatography-Mass spectrometry (GC-MS) technique and further expanded to the exploitation of the electronic noses. Here, the authors made a brief general survey on these progressions. Though the field of electronic noses has made a great progress in recent years, there remain many difficulties in predicting cancer with excellent accuracy. We hope that there should be a breakthrough in this field and every clinic could obtain a useful instrument at a moderate price and, in the near future, could predict with high reliability whether a patient has cancer or not.