Last year, about 28,000 men in United States died of prostate cancer, and still there is no effective, non-invasive test to diagnose the disease. Now, British researchers have come up with a non-invasive diagnostic tool that can ‘smell’ prostate cancer in the urine of men.

According to the National Cancer Institute, the test could offer hope for African-American men or the ones having a family history of prostate cancer. The two groups are thought to be more vulnerable to the disease.

The device named Odoreader is a gas chromatography (GC) sensor that functions in a way similar to an ‘electronic nose’ by recognizing various patterns of compounds linked to urological cancers in the urine of patients. Urine samples are out into the device, whereby an algorithm runs and leads to the detection of the cancer.

In a news release, study author Norman Ratcliffe, a material and sensor sciences professor at the University of the West of England, said that positioning of the prostate gland, which is quite close to the bladder, provides the urine profile with a different algorithm in case a man is suffering from cancer.

In a study appeared on Thursday in the Journal of Breath Research, Ratcliffe and the University of Liverpool researchers tested the device on 155 men at urology clinics. The releases suggested that out of the overall men, 58 got diagnosed with prostate cancer, 24 had bladder cancer, and 73 suffered from haematuria or poor stream without cancer. They discovered that the test succeeded in detecting the compound patterns linked to cancer.

In the release, Raj Prasad, consultant urologist at Southmead Hospital, of the North Bristol NHS Trust, said, “If this test succeeds at full medical trial, it will revolutionize diagnostics”. Prasad wasn’t a part of the study.