The New Sniffer
Sniffer dogs, move over – scientists have developed new artificial intelligence that can quickly identify chemical structures of psychoactive “designer drugs,” New Scientist reported.
The novel DarkNPS tool can help authorities fast-track lab tests of substances such as cocaine and heroin that have been designed to evade detection.
Lead researcher Michael Skinnider and his team explained in their paper that they trained the AI by including the tandem mass spectrometry results of around 1,700 known designer drugs collected from forensic labs across the globe.
Tandem mass spectrometry is a technique that reveals information on the mass of a molecule and the elements found in it.
The team wrote that the machine learning tool can identify patterns between tandem mass spectrometry data and chemical structures. Their findings showed the machine could guess a molecular structure of a substance with a 51 percent accuracy.
That number increased to 86 percent if the AI could narrow down its search to the top ten predictions.
“This could save an enormous amount of time and make it possible to identify new designer drugs much sooner after they’ve hit the market,” said Skinnider.
The authors also noted that the machine could be used to look into drugs that could be developed in the future.
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