>> [MUSIC] Molecules are amazing things.
They're like atoms held together by springs,
springs that allow the atoms
to move and vibrate in
molecular spectroscopy is used
by Jun and myself here,
are basically looking at
the frequencies of the motions
of these atoms in a molecule.
>> Atoms and molecules,
they emit light, they absorb light.
In fact, light is the tool that we
communicate with the microscopic world
of atoms and molecules.
We had developed a tool
called optical frequency comb
for the sake of
optical atomic clocks, for timekeeping.
We can use this to measure molecules.
And it wouldn't be funny if
we could use this to smell
people's breath and tell
the health conditions of a particular person.
>> What we've been doing is
looking at something on the order of
150 COVID positive and
COVID negative participants in the study.
And looking at their breath samples,
and looking at all the
different frequencies that are
absorbed or not absorbed
using this frequency comb.
>> I can collect
hundreds of thousands of
detection channels all at once.
And that's why we can
detect many different kinds of molecules.
Each molecule leaves
a bunch of different fingerprints.
And you can just count how many
fingerprints you have there.
You can have really
unambiguous identification of the molecules.
But before the machine
learning tool was introduced,
I really wasn't sure how we're
going to process all that data.
So what the machine-learning can do is that,
no matter what features
that you are putting into the machine,
it can look through all of them one-by-one.
>> It's hard to say whether it's
caused by this molecule or this molecule.
We don't know that. We just like take
the entire spectral feature
and put it into the machine.
And the machine will tell us.
>> You just look at all the patterns of
thousands or hundreds of thousands
of those lines,
and they tried to directly
use machine to learn about
the difference between COVID
positive and COVID negative,
to see if those lines
have any differences in them.
>> And this way you can maximize
the separation between
the measurement results for the COVID
positive persons versus that
for the negative persons.
>> And turns out the machine
starts to make those predictions with
a pretty high accuracy, 85%.
It's a perfect marriage
between data science and
collecting billions of molecular
spectroscopy information.
And that's actually a much
richer than saying,
what is the molecular signature
of a particular virus.
Now that we can see COVID and
we can see some personal attributes as well,
We can see whether you have abdominal pain,
whether you have constipation,
the breath will tell.
And what's interesting is of course
breath changes, unlike your gene.
So you could actually see the timeline of
your life and tracking
your medical history and so on.
So I actually think it's
endless possibilities out here.
So we want to take this much more
in having some medical doctors help
us collecting samples from
patients who have COPD, for example.
But we are not limiting
ourselves and they could it be lung cancer,
could it be kidney failure.
>> If we can miniaturize these ideas
down and have them,
let's say in every hospital,
the dream would be that
you'd walk into a hospital
or a doctor's office,
and the first thing you do is
you blow in a tube.
>> And then one min later, we'll tell you,
here are the conditions of
your possible things of
your body they may want to watch out
or go for further analysis.
I actually am very confident,
this tool is going to become one of
the best tools out there to be able to
do non-invasive diagnosis
of your medical conditions.
>> To be able to contribute to basically,
the evolution of medicine at societal level,
that would really moved me. [MUSIC]